A People Apart: A Political History of the Jews in Europe, 1789-1939 0199246815, 9780199246816

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
List of Maps
List of Tables
A Note on Transliteration and Translation
Abbreviations
Introduction: The Old Dispensation
Part I: Integration and Fragmentation
1 Proposals
2 Disjunctions
3 Questions from Without and Within
Part II: Aspirations and Equivocations
4 Movement
5 Auto-emancipation?
6 Crystallization
Part III: New Dispensations
7 War
8 Peace
9 Captivity
10 Denouement
Epilogue
Bibliography
Glossary
Index

Citation preview

OXFORD HISTORY OF MODERN^UTROSMB General Editors LORD BULLOCK and SIR WILLIAM DEAKIN

Oxford History of Modern Europe THE STRUGGLE FOR MASTERY IN EUROPE 1848-1918 Available in paperback By A. J. P. TAYLOR THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE 1801-1917 Available in paperback By HUGH SETON-WATSON

A HISTORY OF FRENCH PASSIONS Available in paperback in two volumes AMBITION, LOVE, AND POLITICS INTELLECT, TASTE, AND ANXIETY

By THEODORE ZELDIN GERMANY 1866-1945 Available in paperback By GORDON A. CRAIG

THE LOW COUNTRIES 1780-1940 By E. H. ROSSMANN SPAIN 1808-1975 Available in paperback By RAYMOND CARR GERMAN HISTORY 1770-1866 Available in paperback By JAMES J. SHEEHAN

A PEOPLE APART: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN EUROPE 1789-1939 Available in paperback By DAVID VITAL THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPEAN POLITICS 1763-1848 Available in paperback By PAUL W. SCHROEDER

A PEOPLE APART A POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN EUROPE 1789-1939 BY

DAVID VITAL

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Vital, David. A people apart : a political history of the Jews in Europe. 1789-1939 / by David Vital, p. cm.—(Oxford history of modem Europe) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Jews—Europe—History. 2. Jews—History—1789-1945. 3. Jews— Europe—Politics and government. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)— Causes. 5. Antisemitism—Europe—History. 6. Europe—Ethnic relations. 1. Title. 11. Series. DS135.E83V58 1999 940*.04924—dc21 98-51332

ISBN 0-19-821980-6 (hbk.) ISBN 0-19-924681-5 (pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset in Monotype Bembo byjayvee, Trivandrum, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Bookcraft Ltd., Midsomer Norton Nr. Bath, Somerset

PREFACE Real or fancied grievances are in themselves [insufficient to pro­ duce, however strongly they may favour, the emergence of active hostility against a social order. For such an atmosphere to develop it is necessary that there be groups to whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it, and to lead it. . . . The mass of people never develops definite opinions on its own initiative. Still less is it able to articulate them and to turn them into consistent attitudes and actions. All it can do is to follow or refuse to follow such group leadership as may offer itself.

Joseph Schumpeter1

This is a political history. There is, of course, a great deal more to public and private life than politics and much that is infinitely more agreeable to contemplate. The study of power and authority and the men and women who wield them draws us, like it or not, to an examination ofwhat is harshest, ugliest, and most dangerous in human conduct—besides which, ofall spheres ofpub­ lic activity, that which entails social control is the one most likely to be touched by pathology. But there is more than a little truth in Lenin s infamous, yet penetrat­ ing remark that much—he himself thought everything—boils down to the question who rules whom.2 For indeed, when all is said and done, the realm in which the ultimately crucial affairs ofsociety evolve is the power­ political. There life touches most closely upon death. There the siren calls to conflict are sweetest. There cowardice vies most successfully with courage, cruelty with enterprise, and overweening personal ambi­ tion with infinite despair. Thus for all peoples at one time or another. Thus for the Jewish people throughout their history—but with quite exceptional intensity in Europe during the period with which this book deals. While it has been difficult, therefore, to avoid writing this book in any other spirit than that which Jonathan Swift termed ‘savage indignation’,

1 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 5th edn. (London, 1976), 145. 2 ‘Novaya ekonomicheskaya politika’, report to the Second All-Russian Congress of Political Education Departments, 17 Oct. 1921. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochionenii, 5th edn., xliv (Moscow, 1964), 161.

viii

PREFACE

the effort has been made. How successful the effort to write with an appropriate measure of restraint has been I leave, needless to say, to others to judge—although, that said, I have not thought that restraint should deter one from asking the deeper questions raised by the grim fate that overtook the Jews of Europe; or that an attempt to answer them, if only in part, could be in any other than political terms; or again that, with that being the intention, the account could fail to be anything other than rig­ orously selective. Much in the recent social, cultural, theological, and literary history of the Jews that is by any ordinary reckoning of surpassing interest has, accordingly, been set aside. It is to the sourer, harsher matters that lay at the centre of the political evolution and travails of European Jewry between the French Revolution and the outbreak of the Second World War that attention has been paid almost exclusively. The present account is selective too in that it was not, and could not have been, part of my intention to construct a full, which is to say geographically and demographically comprehensive, account even of the politics of the Jews of Europe in the period chosen, let alone of their social, cultural, and religious life. Many ancient and distinguished communities will be found to be absent, or virtually so, from these pages. But then if the absolute essentials of the Jewish condition were not to recede from view it had to be those whose affairs had demonstrable consequences for the Jewish people in Europe as a whole and in the longest of runs, or whose affairs serve to illustrate the main continent-wide lines of overall development with special clarity, that would have to speak for all. This was not a happy course to follow nor, having regard for past dis­ tinction and achievement, could it be an altogether just one. But to have proceeded otherwise, namely to have given all communities their due, let alone attempt to treat all communities in all their aspects, would have been to compile a study of an essentially encyclopaedic character, besides increasing the size of the book beyond the tolerance of even the most generous of publishers—and, of course, beyond that of any readily con­ ceivable potential reader as well. And it would have vitiated the one basis on which, as it seemed to me, it might be worth while to attempt a study of this kind in the first place: that of interpretation. Strict chronology and an attempt at comprehensiveness had to give way to the exploration of themes. The function of what it has become customary to call anecdotal detail had to be limited to the support and elucidation of argument. Description had never to be more than the handmaiden of analysis. Some may think that it would, none the less, have been braver to seek to deal with the entirety of European Jewry in the relevant period come what may. Perhaps. My view has been that coherence depended before all else on setting a limit to the questions to be dealt with and on being as clear as possible in one’s own mind about the terms on which answers

PREFACE

ix

were to be sought and formulated. Above all, both questions and answers had to be geared to what were plainly the final determinants of the Jews’ situation, to the manner and degree to which those who presumed to lead them sought—or failed—to cope with successive onslaughts upon their people, and to the ease and rapidity with which so great a segment of this ancient nation could be made (but equally, was allowed) to founder. However one were to proceed it was inevitable that great debts would be incurred. That has certainly been so in my case: in the first instance to the very many authors of scholarly studies on which I found myself relying, few of them known to me personally, but whose names, number, and variety are attested to in the Bibliography and the footnotes. A debt of a direct and more personal order is owed to the Editors of this series, Lord Bullock and Sir William Deakin: for their very great patience over rather more than a decade while the book was in the making, for the constant, quiet, and indispensable encouragement repeatedly afforded me, and for the advice they gave me when it was most needed. My old friend Professor [Lord] Max Beloff was kind enough to scru­ tinize the manuscript and save me from many errors. Michel Opatowski gave generously of his time to prepare the maps. The International Insti­ tute of Social History at Amsterdam provided me with hospitality for a season and invaluable assistance in the location of important material. I am most grateful too to Dr Sylviane Colombo, Dr Oleg Gorelov, Mrs Ayala Laron, Dr Dina Porat, Ms Svetlana Pererozin, Dr Gerhart Riegner, Mrs Liora Sonshine, and the librarians at Tel Aviv and Northwestern Universities, all of whom were helpful to me in one way or another, in some cases over very long periods, while this book was in preparation. As it is usual but always proper to say, the faults of the book and all remaining errors in it are, of course, mine alone. D.V. April 1998

CONTENTS List of Maps List of Tables

xiv

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

XVÎ

xv

xvii

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION: THE OLD DISPENSATION I. II. III. IV. V. VI.

1 1 4 9 12 17 24

The old regime Two levels of authority, two yokes to bear Social control: the modalities The gevir Self-help and self-governance Consensus and conformism

Part I. Integration and Fragmentation 1.

PROPOSALS I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VIL

2.

31

Under the Enlightenment—‘useful’Jews and‘useless’Jews In England—incrementalism In France—principles In the Germanies—impenetrable hostility and legal rigour In Poland—deadlock In Russia—despotism for all. . . .. . but the Jews as an encumbrance to be dealt with

DISJUNCTIONS I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII.

3.

27

99

Emancipation: the early responses The fears of the orthodox The enthusiasm of the modernists The cultural inroads The haskalah as a halfway house Modem education—the Russian carrot Military conscription—the Russian lash The irreversibility of fragmentation

99 103 121 130 136 146 156 163

QUESTIONS FROM WITHOUT AND WITHIN I. The Jewish Question posed II. The Question formulated

31 37 42 63 69 80 89

166

166

183

ü

CONTENTS

III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X.

The Jews re-characterized 185 The Jews re-demonized 189 Calls for treatment 198 The Decembrists (along with other Russians) try their hand 205 Internal politics: the beginnings 211 Triumph at Damascus... 232 ... and its limitations 244 Jews in general politics and in society at large: the German model 248

Part II. Aspirations andEquivocations 4.

MOVEMENT I. II. III. IV. V. VI.

5.

Pogroms Poverty Migration Decline West versus East Eastern European Jewry as the question

283

283 291 297 310 317 334

/1UTO-EMANCIPATION?

346

Leaderlessness as a condition National self-determination as an idea; Zion as a destination w III. Jews as revolutionaries IV. The Bund V. Herzl

346

I. II.

6.

279

CRYSTALLIZATION I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI.

Intercession institutionalized 1878—triumph in Berlin, failure in Bucharest The limits of intercession Kishinev as a paradigm Impotence, shame, and fury Violence and counter-violence The blood-libel and the rule of law Bernard Lazare and the Affair Russia in 1905—Jews as targets, Jews as participants The Zionists stand still The orthodox circle their wagons

Part III. New Dispensations 7. WAR I.

The Jewish contingents

366 400 415 437 476

476 487 508 509 515 528 535 540 566 593 616

641 647 647

CONTENTS

II. III. IV. V. VI.

8.

PEACE I. II. III. IV.

9.

Bolshevik Russia and the binding of its Jews The great slaughter Who speaks for the Jews? At the Peace Conference

CAPTIVITY I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX.

10.

The Jewish increment The ‘Palestine Idea’ A neutral Zionism, belligerent Zionists The ‘Palestine Idea’ revived Self-determination

Wilson’s world The nation-state as grindstone Ancient frictions in the new Poland Polish equivocation; Jewish ambivalence Germany takes the lead Machtergreifung Towards extrusion The Jews of Germany crushed A community destroyed

DENOUEMENT I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII.

On the eve Once again: who will lead them, where will they be led? A World Jewish Congress Loyalties and principles The purposes of Zionism, the needs of the Jews Pragmatism and honour The final rejection Into the night

xiii

651 664 675 687 692

703 703 715 728 739

755 755 761 774 798 800 804 809 823 829

837 837 841 849 856 867

875 881 890

EPILOGUE

897

Bibliography Glossary Index

899 918 921

LIST OF MAPS 1. The Jewish population of the Russian Empire in 1897 2. Density ofjewish population in interwar Poland: provinces and major urban centres (1931 figures)

300

764

LIST OF TABLES 2.1.

French and German (as opposed to Hebrew and Jewish) names borne by Jews in Strasbourg

132

2.2.

Jewish population of Vienna and Budapest in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the cities’ total population

134

2.3.

Jewish population of Warsaw and Lodz in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the cities’ total population

134

4.1.

Jews in selected occupations as a proportion of all Jews in gainful occupations

303

4.2.

Migration of Jews and Poles to the United States from both the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian Empires and back, 1908-1910 308

4.3.

Foreign Jews as a proportion of all Jews in Second Reich Germany

313

Jewish citizens and non-citizens of Second Reich Germany, compared

314

6.1. Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States

584

4.4.

8.1. Elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly

9.1.

The components of multinational Poland (1931 figures)

9.2.

Ethnic minorities in the Hungarian nation-state (1931 figures)

9.3.

Factory employment ofjews and non-Jews compared

9.4.

Elections to the Sejm, 1919: Jewish parties in Congress Poland compared Warsaw community council election (major lists only), 6 September 1936

9.5.

10.1. E. 1.

Membership of the World Zionist Organization, 1911-1939

706 763 766

775 783

795

868 The extirpation of European Jewry by the military and police forces of Germany and its allies, 1939-1945 897

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION Hebrew terms have been rendered phonetically, so far as possible, rather than according to strict scholarly convention. No distinction has been drawn between tav and tet, for example; both are rendered as t. The (soft) pe refuya is rendered as/ the (hard) pe degusha as p. The gutturals het and khafÇboth of which are approximately the ch in ‘loch’) have been translit­ erated as /land kh respectively; the zaddi (roughly the ts in ‘pits’) as z; the guttural ‘ayin as the alef (where transliteration might otherwise suggest a diphthong) as ’. Names have been given in the form preferred or employed by the person in question, if known, or in the form by which he or she is best known. In case of doubt the Encyclopaedia Judaica has been consulted. Where English equivalents for place-names are sufficiently familiar they have been used: Jerusalem,*therefore, not Yerushalayyim; Moscow not Moskva. In a very few cases it seemed appropriate to refer to the Jewish or the Julian calendars (the latter indicated by the addition of ‘O[ld]. S[tyle] .* Otherwise, dates are according to the usual western or Gregorian calendar. Unless otherwise indicated, English translations of source material are the author’s.

ABBREVIATIONS AE AIU AJA BoD Bund

CAHJP CZA DGFP Diaries

EAC FRUS GAC HaBaD HLRO ICA IOLR ITO JFC JSS Kolo KPD

KPP LBIYB Mapai OZON

PPS PRO RSA RSDWP

French Foreign Ministry Archives Alliance Israélite Universelle Anglo-Jewish Association Board of Deputies ofBritish Jews (Archives) Algemeyner yidisher arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln, un Rusland (General Jewish Workers’ Party of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia) Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People Central Zionist Archives Documents on German Foreign Policy Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries, ed. Raphael Patai, English trans. Harry Zohn, 5 vols. (New York, 1960) Smaller Actions Committee (Executive) of the World Zionist Organization Foreign Relations of the United States Greater Actions Committee of the World Zionist Organization Hokhma Bina Da'at (Hasidic movement founded by Shne’ur Zalman of Lyadi) House of Lords Record Office Jewish Colonial Association India Office Library and Records Jewish Territorial Organization Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association Jewish Social Studies Koto Éydowskie (Jewish caucus in the Polish parliament) Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party) Komunistyczna Partia Polska (Communist Party of Poland) Leo Baeck Institute Year Book Mifleget Po'alei Erez Yisrael (Palestine Workers* Party) Oboz Zjednoczenia Narodowego (Camp of National Unity in Poland) Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (Polish Socialist Party) Public Record Office Russian State Archives Rosiiskaya sotsial-demokraticheskaya rabochaya partiya (Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party)

xviii

SHAT SPD SRO WA WJC WZO

ABBREVIATIONS

Service Historique de F Armée de Terre Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social Democratic Party) Scottish Record Office Weizmann Archives World Jewish Congress World Zionist Organization

INTRODUCTION

The Old Dispensation i

N 18 December 1744, in the wake of the siege and occupation of Prague in the course of the War of the Austrian Succession and the suspicion (unfounded, as it later turned out) that the Jews of Prague had given aid and support to the Prussians, Maria The ofAustria decreed the total and immediate expulsion of the distinguished and long-settled Jewish community of Prague. It was to be carried out almost immediately. It was to be followed in short order by the expulsion of all Jews from all of Bohemia and Moravia. Gzeirot (punitive decrees) of this and other kinds were familiar enough to Jews everywhere through­ out their history. The fortunate knew them as a permanent possibility. The less fortunate knew them as a palpable menace. The rule was to do whatever could be done to have them revoked; if not revoked postponed; if not postponed watered down; and if that could not be managed then so far as possible circumvented. What was understood by all, high and low, was that if all else failed, the Jews upon whom the^znra fell would have to learn to live with it if it was possible to do so and to move on to other lands if it was not. There were no real choices. Outright (for example, armed) resistance was out of the question. Gzeirot, it was necessary to rec­ ognize, were characteristic, and in the long term unchanging and unchangeable features of the Exile itself. They might take the form of an increase in the burden of taxation so sudden, steep, and extortionate as to be barely sustainable, or fresh restrictions on—or, worse, an absolute pro­ hibition of—residence in, or temporary entry into, a designated town or territory. They might be measures regulating the dress ofjewish men and women, or laying down rules for the external or even internal furnishing of their synagogues or homes. They could be the establishment of a con­ straint so severe as to amount to a defacto or even dejure prohibition of the right to marry and raise a family, or to bear arms, or to employ non-Jews, or to be employed by non-Jews, or to bury one’s dead in a communal cemetery—and therefore, in effect, to maintain a community of any kind at all. Commonest of all was the institution of some additional restriction on what was almost invariably highly restricted freedom to engage in par­ ticular trades, crafts, or professions. However, all this said, while the repertoire from which a sovereign ruler or city corporation or the Church (in Rome itself, notably) had

O

INTRODUCTION

long been free to draw their material (and, for the most part, public) advantage was a large one, recourse to it had been declining since the end of the seventeenth century. Certain items had dropped entirely from view. Forced religious confrontations and disputations—in which Jews well knew they dared not have the better of the official representatives of Christianity—had gone out of fashion. The forced attendance of entire communities at sessions in which representatives of the Church were free to harangue them on the merits of Christianity and the evils and errors of Judaism were now virtually unknown. The much harsher—from the ruler’s point of view less profitable, although, in the eyes of many faithful Christians, more meritorious—gzeira of banishment had become quite rare. By the eighteenth century, in western and central Europe such celebrated and dramatic cases of expulsion as that from England in 1290, from France in 1306, from Germany in 1348, from Lithuania in 1445, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497, and from countless cities and minor territories (Cracow, Magdeburg, Trent, and Paris among them) at one time or another had begun to seem to all, Jews and non-Jews alike, to belong to a truly benighted and fortunately (or, as some still thought, unfortunately) irrecoverable past. In these circumstances, Maria Theresa’s revival of so brutal a sanction in the mid-eighteenth century struck a nerve throughout European Jewry. Implemented in full it would have put an entire population on to the roads of Europe to march through lands in which they were unlikely to be allowed to settle in search of one in which they might. It was to condemn very many thousands to months, conceivably years, of home­ lessness, uncertainty, pauperization, sickness, and the high probability of unspeakable depredations en route at the hands of those inhabiting the territories through which the travellers would have to pass. The further consequences might be larger still. Would the Empress’s decree set a precedent? Would there be reason to fear, as a Jewish notable in Amster­ dam wrote to a correspondent in Venice, that ‘the fire would spread to other kingdoms and states and to the remotest of corners, . . . wherever [the people of] Israel were to be found’?1 When leading figures in com­ munities within the Habsburg domains and in Holland were alerted by the elders of Prague to what was impending, and as the news passed by letter and by word of mouth from community to community throughout central and western Europe, and to a limited extent in eastern Europe as well, the response was electric. Every ruler, minister, parliamentary assembly, or prelate thought likely to be willing to intercede with the empress in Vienna and plead for mercy for her Jewish subjects was approached: the Dutch States-General, the king of England, the king of 1 B. Mevorah, ‘Ma‘asei ha-hishtadlut be-eiropa li-meni'at geirusham shel yehudei bohemiya u-moraviya, 1744-1745’, Zion, 28, 3-4 (1963), 136-7.

THE OLD DISPENSATION

3

Denmark, the Senate of the Venetian Republic and the rulers of other Italian states, numerous bishops and archbishops, those of BambergWürzburg and Mainz among them, the Pope himself, the Sultan of Turkey—some directly, some indirectly, as each case was thought to war­ rant. Remarkably, the response was gratifying. The Dutch representative at Vienna was told to point out that, while it was true that the issue was a domestic one, the economic ruin ofBohemian Jewry was certain to have serious financial consequences for Holland. His English colleague was instructed to convey to the empress that King George II, having received a Jewish delegation and heard of what was impending, ‘does extremely commiserate the terrible circumstances of distress . . . [and] is most. . . earnestly desirous ofprocuring the repeal ofit by His Royal intercession’. The ambassador was further instructed to co-operate with his Dutch col­ league, as was the Danish minister in Vienna as well. It is true, that none of these representations, nor any of the many others that followed, pro­ duced immediate results. Always profoundly hostile to Jewry on a priori theological grounds, the empress was adamant in her refusal to entertain pleas of any kind on behalf of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia and resented the pressure being exerted upon her. Her ministers, most of whom, on reflection, regretted the decree, learned to be circumspect about discussing it with her. The few Jews privileged to reside in Vienna itself (there was no community to speak of at this point), their privileges normally extending to access (limited, to be sure) to the court, were warned of dire penalties if they so much as dared to raise the issue. When George II of England (and Elector of Hanover) ordered a second approach to the empress and had his ambassador make clear his view, that ‘Her persevering in that severe and merciless resolution could not but be esteemed by all mankind as an indelible stain both in point ofjustice and clemency upon her hitherto moderate and equitable Government’,2 Maria Theresa was infuriated. But, bit by bit, the stings went home and the wind changed. Three Jewish notables were allowed at long last to kneel in the dust before the empress’s carriage and submit a petition for mercy to her. The full expulsion from all Bohemia and Moravia was first postponed, then, in effect, rescinded. After a decent interval, those Jews of Prague whose exodus had already begun were allowed to return to their city and to their homes. A century would pass before those who were accepted as leaders in European Jewry would again be roused to such a spurt of integrated and purposeful activity in a cause of this kind. Another century would pass before the fate ofdie Jews ofPrague, along with those of all Bohemia and Moravia and indeed those of the rest of Europe, would again be in ques­ tion. But what the affair of Maria Theresa’s decree of banishment calls 2 Citations in Mevorah, ‘Ma'asei’, 148-9, 156.

4

INTRODUCTION

attention to most precisely is the fragility of the balance between the new, civilizing impact of the Enlightenment on the approach of some among the prominent European princes and governments to the matter of the Jews, and the older, more deeply rooted, countervailing considerations that governed the conduct of others. It calls attention too to the degree to which public action on behalf of a segment of the Jewish people still turned in the mid-eighteenth century on the contingency of personal access to the governing lay and ecclesiastical authorities in the lands of their Dispersion; and indirectly to the fact that the system of governance which lay at the heart of the matter ofpower and authority under the Old Dispensation was a dual one: sovereign power on the one hand, largely autonomous internal governance on the other.

II The contrast between the two levels of authority to which the Jews of Europe were subject was striking. While the exercise of power and authority within Jewry was limited in degree and variable in scope, power overJewry, meaning that wielded by others, was generally firm, enduring, and, for all practical purposes, absolute. It was absolute in the sense that the circumstances of the Jews through the centuries of their presence in Europe were such that life in a particular place, and what they were allowed to make of it,- was, ultimately, the gift of others to grant or to withdraw. And yet, while absolute and virtually irresistible, the power of the sovereign was never comprehensive. Each communal authority—and all supra-communal institutions too where their establishment was per­ mitted3—had indeed to operate in its shadow. But it was always an open question how far and in what precise respects the higher, sovereign power 3 The most famous of such supra-communal institutions was the Council of the Four Lands (Va ‘ad arb‘a araçot), founded at the end of the sixteenth century, suppressed by the Polish Sejm in 1764. At its peak, in the seventeenth century, it operated as the central, oligarchic regulator of Jewish life in Poland and Lithuania, the forum in which serious internal disputes could be settled without recourse to alien authority, and as Jewry’s estab­ lished, institutional representative vis-à-vis king, Sejm, and Church for a great range of subjects, among them, typically, the buying-off of authorities where the banishment of entire communities had been ordered, the ransoming of prisoners, and, in one celebrated instance, the dispatch of an emissary to appeal to the Pope to intervene in the case of an accusation of ritual murder (an ancient, monstrous, but not infrequent charge laid against Jews, on which see below, pp. 233 ff). The Council’s value to the kingdom and its insti­ tutions lay elsewhere, of course: chiefly in its uses as a tax-gathering machine. Its suppres­ sion in the middle of the eighteenth century owed something to the winds of modernism and efficient state administration that had begun to enter eastern Europe from the west, but a good deal more to both king and Sejm having concluded that the Jews had been milked dry and that the Council was effectively bankrupt. It followed, they believed, that its days as a tax-farming institution were over and that the republic would do better to subject its Jewish inhabitants to direct taxation.

THE OLD DISPENSATION

would wish or be able to encroach upon the community’s internal affairs and in what circumstances the community was prepared to acquiesce or, on the contrary, likely to try to stand its ground. All concerned, rulers and ruled, non-Jews and Jews, high and low, learned and unschooled, were agreed that the law of the land—in practice the law of the alien ruler— was, generally speaking, law for Jews no less than for the ruler’s other subjects. The matter of its intrinsic legitimacy so far as the Jews were con­ cerned remained problematic, however. The famous, endlessly repeated Talmudic doctrine of dina de-malkhuta—dina4 (‘the law of the king­ dom [is] law’) could be understood as laying down a formal, perhaps even a moral, obligation to respect and obey the alien ruler of the day and place. It could be taken too as recommending no more than a pragmatic accommodation to the reality of superior power. In the Talmudic way of things, no final and definitive teaching on this score ever emerged; and if Jews did commonly conceive of the law of the land as binding upon them, in practice it was mostly as a matter of general, day-to-day neces­ sity rather than as a consequence of full moral and political obligation. The prevailing view was that it was for themselves, not for others, to determine what true obedience they owed the sovereign, if any at all. It needs to be noted, however, that this limited and conditional accept­ ance of the ruler’s authority (as opposed to power) over them was mir­ rored in the status they themselves were accorded by their political masters. The governing view ofJewry in the Christian world was of a people who were deeply alien and antagonistic to, and therefore, if only by their presence within it, subversive of, the res publica Christiana.5 But as, regrettably, they had come to be embedded physically within Christen­ dom, it was necessary to ensure that formally, legally, morally, and socially they needed in some way to be excluded from it. It followed, too, that nothing was owed them, at all events not as a matter of principle or fun­ damental law; and that on the contrary, again as a matter of principle, much was to be denied them. They might be granted specific privileges: the right of residence, the right to worship after their own fashion, the right to bury their dead in a cemetery of their own, the right to trade in, for example, old clothes and old coins and other suchlike debased and debasing lines of commerce. They had also, of course, the celebrated freedom to lend money against interest. There was a distant sense, there­ fore, in which, the Roman system of public, universally applicable law having died away, the Jews, taken community by community, assumed a form that was analogous to that of other social or economic collectivities and organisms allowed to operate on the basis of the specific privileges 4 Nashim: Nedarim 28. 5 Matters were somewhat different in the Islamic world, although the rule that the Jews were to be kept explicitly and visibly in a subordinate social and political position was never in question there either.

6

INTRODUCTION

granted them by (or successfully wrested from) the sovereigns in question. Still, the case of the Jews was conceived ofas fundamentally dif­ ferent from that of the guilds, the universities, the city corporations, the orders of knighthood, and, moving from medieval times to the age of the Reformation and beyond, the dissident Christian sects. The difference was moral and ideological and, by extension, political. Both the rights and privileges granted them from time to time and the consequences for the Jews themselves in the event of their being subsequently withdrawn were different in kind. In general, the open, arbitrary revocation of rights solemnly granted by a European sovereign was rare and tended very com­ monly to be perceived as improper, even illegitimate. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV reverberates to this day—in history books, at all events—as an immensely dishonourable, and, many would say, misguided act of state. No such judgement was accorded the revoca­ tion of rights formally granted to Jews. It was the actual granting of rights or privileges that rendered the ruler liable to public (by no means exclu­ sively churchly) censure. By the same token, the cancellation of such privileges was likely to be met with approval, contemporary or retro­ spective. With the possible exception of the wholesale expulsion of their Jewish subjects by the Catholic monarchs of Spain no great and irre­ versible act of state directed against the Jewish people in pre-modern times ever attained anything like the notoriety that accrued to the Revo­ cation of the Edict of Nantes. And even then 1492 came to be seen by those who ventured to disapprove ofit as a blunder,6 rather than a wrong­ doing or a betrayal. In this sense the protests Maria Theresa brought upon herself in 1744 indicated a certain (although not, as we shall see, final and decisive) shift in the prevailing wind. Underlying everything was the central fact that under the old regime no Jew was, or could be, a member of (civil) society. No matter how learned or wealthy or contingently influential he might be within or without Jewry itself, a Jew was held to belong to a moral and, of course, theological category inferior to that of the meanest peasant. Dealings with him and his kind were therefore in a class apart from all other social and economic and afortiori political relations. Of admitting the Jews col­ lectively or by community to a legitimate and established place and status in the state and in society as an estate there was no question. They were alien. They were tainted. They were therefore removable. Arrangements respecting them could not and need not be other than defacto and ad hoc, fimctions, most commonly, of anticipated material advantage, as opposed to justice or equity. Even where matters were somewhat otherwise, in the sense that considerations of a humane nature did operate to some degree, 6 Prescott, it may be recalled, took the milder view that the expulsion of the Jews (and of the Muslims) from Spain was dictated by intelligible considerations ofrawow d'état.

THE OLD DISPENSATION

7

it was still the essentially arbitrary nature of the relevant ruling that was uppermost. What a liberally minded seventeenth-century king of Den­ mark was pleased to allow, his jealous and bigoted neighbour, the cor­ poration of Hamburg, was intent on denying. But the king of Denmark was still free to change his mind—as, of course, was (and, in the course of time, did) the City of Hamburg. But in one important respect, the vast power and seemingly untrammelled freedom of action that accrued to the sovereign was less simple. The exclusion of the Jews from the main formal structures of the realm, and their consignment en bloc to what Max Weber correcdy termed pariah status, served to reduce, not enhance, the sovereign’s ability to rule their daily lives. The precedents for accepting that for certain purposes and within cer­ tain limits the Jews remained subject to laws of their own were of great antiquity and it had always been beyond the wit of anyone to devise a means by which the law of the land and the Law of the Jews could be ren­ dered compatible. The penalties Jews incurred for crossing the wishes and ignoring the predilections of the alien temporal or ecclesiastical power could be very severe. It did not matter how large or small their community, how prosperous or indigent its members, whether they were mild or pugnacious in their habits of mind and speech, and what the restrictions were that they were expected to labour under. So long as their presence in the form of a structured community was permitted—or ‘tol­ erated’, as the cant term had it—their governance invariably rested on a working arrangement between the wielders of the two varieties and levels of authority and power, the internal and the external. However stringent and oppressive the conditions laid down by the superordinate, external sovereign power in the land, there had still to be room for the community’s own leaders to manage its essential, internal affairs in their own way. Which of its affairs fell within their remit and what conditions and reservations, if any, attached to their management were questions to which very diverse answers were given at various times and places. In all cases, however, so far as the Jews themselves were concerned, it was before all else by the degree and quality of self-government allowed them that the alien regime would ultimately be judged. Where the constraints laid upon Jewish self-government were minimal, there the pull ofJews into the territory in question was likely to be great. Where they were heavy and difficult or even impossible to sustain, there the effect was to encourage, if not to compel, emigration, even flight. What was decisive and invariable was that observance of the Law was predicated absolutely on a regularly functioning community and that this in turn was predi­ cated on a structure of authority and management within it. Whatever constraints happened to be placed upon its individual members, however difficult people’s day-to-day existence might be rendered, it was the degree to which the community as such was able to maintain its essential,

8

INTRODUCTION

continuous internal autonomy that was decisive. And since no commu­ nity (as traditionally conceived) could function on the basis of total sub­ jection to the law of the land, namely to the law of the gentiles, there had to be some minimal satisfaction of the Jews’ uncompromising view that they must be free to live their own lives in their own way and for their own reasons if there was to be a Jewish presence in the land at all. Church and state alike had to accept that attempts to incorporate the Jews into an alien society either collectively or individually would be resisted; that whatever could be done to block the erosion of their internal solidarity and cohesion would be done; and, in sum, that it was a fundamental art­ icle of faith and outlook among the Jews that they were, and were required by the Almighty to continue to be, a nation apart. It was entirely characteristic, therefore, that the once great Jewish con­ centration in Poland began, famously, with the laying down of the prin­ ciple—established and made effective in parts of the land as early as the thirteenth century under the terms of the privilegium (Statute of Kalisz, 12647) decreed by Prince Boleslaw the Pious and extended by later rulers—that Jews were not to be subject to ordinary judicial jurisdiction and procedures. A century later Casimir the Great extended it to virtu­ ally all of Poland as then constituted. The same principle entailed, as a central element, the withdrawal of the rights of the Church, the urban patriciate, and (at least for a time) of the nobility as well to judge the Jews—most notably in cases where charges had been brought against them by non-Jews—and the formal entitlement of Jewish rabbinical courts to try all civil cases in which all parties to the dispute were Jewish. Considering that in Old Poland, as elsewhere in the Middle Ages, judi­ cial authority was a prime symbol of government as well as one of its major instruments, these were remarkable concessions. They highlighted the formal separation of the Jews from the rest of the body politic. They signalled recognition of the fact that a Jew had no reason to expect that justice would be done him in an ordinary court where the plaintiff was a Christian, still less where the alleged victim was one. Where the rabbin­ ical court to which Jews would normally have recourse proved unable to settle the dispute, or one or other of the Jewish disputants sought to appeal its decision, or it was a civil case in which both Jews and Christians were involved, or where a criminal case had been brought against a Jewish defendant, there a specially appointed judex Judaeorum would try the case under the authority of the prince’s (later the king’s) lord lieu­ tenant, the wojewoda* In time, as power shifted from the supreme ruler to the nobility and the 7 But see Sh. A. Cygielman, ‘Le-myan kevi'at ha-ta arikh le-matan ha-privilegia ha-kelalit li-hudei polin-gadol (1264)*, Zion, 44, 3 (1984), 289-2. ” Later, in certain parts of Poland, a competing royal official, the starosta, claimed authority in this, as in other spheres.

THE OLD DISPENSATION

9

wojewoda came to function less as the man who spoke for the king and more as the nobility’s own representative before the sovereign, so the nobility’s ability to exert control over the Jews inhabiting their estates and privately owned towns increased and this special and separate judicial sys­ tem began to erode—before finally being swept away upon the parti­ tioning of Poland towards the end of the eighteenth century and the effort by each one of the new sovereign powers to assert a new, ostensibly more rational system of government.9 But while it lasted it was a useful and in many ways comfortable arrangement for the Jews themselves. It articulated their separate and—within what had become well understood and more or less acceptable Emits—their autonomous corporate status. It helped, as intended, to protect them from much, although never all, of the harassment that was their lot. It confirmed the authority of their own rabbinical courts and so the legitimacy and prestige of the rabbinical half of their own half-lay, half-clerical system of internal government. Less deliberately, but equally effectively, it served to strengthen that same sys­ tem’s other half: that of the parnassim, the lay leaders of the communities in whose hands the day-to-day management of each community was placed—and to some extent the lives and destinies of each of its members too—by whom, to no small extent, even the rabbis’ own ability to func­ tion was determined. Contrariwise, where Jews were tempted, or obliged, to bring their disputes before an alien judicial authority, there the dual system of government may be said to have broken down.

Ill

But as to the questions who the Jews’ leaders might be, how they were to be selected, how it might be proper for given individuals to rise to com­ munal, or supra-communal office and position, and under what terms and subject to what limits they were to exercise such powers as the com­ munity or communities allowed them, no clear and binding, let alone universal, answers were ever established. In this regard, as in many others, traditional Jewish public law was shot through with uncertainties and ambivalences that derived in the first instance from the sheer antiquity of its origins. Much public law (as opposed to the law of personal status) was necessarily inapplicable to the circumstances of exile and to the varying sets of social and political conditions that had obtained in Europe and elsewhere in the course of the fifteen or so centuries that had elapsed since the completion of the Talmud and the consolidation of the Exile. It was the case too that much of what the Sages held to be relevant to 9 Binyamin Cohen, ‘Ha-voivoda be-torat shofet ha-yehudim be-polin ha-yeshana’, Gal-‘ed, 1 (1973), 1-12; and ‘Ha-rashut ha-voivodit ve-ha-kehilla ha-yehudit ba-me’ot ha-16-18*, Gal-'ed, 3 (1976), 9-32.

10

INTRODUCTION

communal governance, the law ofproperty, the administration ofjustice, and the like, is best read as a compendium of references to a utopian state such as neither the Jews nor any other people have ever possessed. The Sages were concerned both with what was intrinsically right and proper and what could, at one and the same time, be worked out in the course of exegesis and amplification of the relevant sacred texts. What emerged from their labours was a conception of government that was in some respects as fanciful as it was morally admirable.10 It is true that the Law of the Jews is of great complexity. It comprises, in addition to the funda­ mental ‘Written’, Biblical Law of Moses the ‘Oral’ Law, the latter being the accumulated interpretations and elaborations of the Written Law as promulgated by the Talmudic Sages, passed on, further reinterpreted, and modified by later commentators and masters on the basis of minutely scholastical, casuistical argument. Many seemingly contradictory things can be read in it and it has indeed been one of the functions of the rabbis to squeeze out the actual rules by which this non-sovereign people, dis­ persed in countless, widely scattered communities, might order its pub­ lic and private affairs. Still, it was never in doubt (until the modern age) that, taken as a whole, despite the immensity of the relevant texts and their burden of real or apparent internal contradictions, the Law was fun­ damental to the life of the Jews. To question its truth, validity, or sacred quality was regarded as silly and impudent at best, wicked and heretical at worst, the really determined questioner being ipsofacto in the wrong and beyond the communal pale. On the other hand, not being a territorial people and not being an estate of any of the realms which they inhabited, the boundaries enclos­ ing the Jews as members of the various communities were in important respects porous. Subject to the exigencies of time and place and allowing for the general conditions of the age—the incidence of war, plague, ban­ ditry, the difficulties of, and the obstacles to, travel, and so forth—move­ ment from one community to another was always possible in theory and law, and to a great extent in practice too. Beyond the licence to mobility, there was the unique nature of their semi-contractual relationship with the relevant governing power. Jews might be in debt to this or that mag­ nate or corporation—typically to city burghers and to members of the hierarchy of the Church. But they were not serfs, nor were they, in the 10 For example: Talmudic criminal law, very properly, it may be thought, lays down multiple safeguards against the undoubted horror ofjudicial error and the wrongful con­ viction and condemnation of the innocent. Alas for practicality, these include the virtual unacceptability of circumstantial evidence; the requirement that at least two adult, male, socially respectable eyewitnesses of the alleged offence be produced before the court; an assurance that the alleged offender had been explicitly warned beforehand against com­ mitting the crime of which he was to be charged; and, in the event of all other conditions being satisfied, a very large bench ofjudges voting unanimously for conviction.

THE OLD DISPENSATION

11

accepted sense, vassals. Having no established rights within any territory, they were generally free of overriding obligations: military service, for example. Nor was the internal socio-political structure of any Jewish community of such a nature as to bind one man or woman within it to another on any basis other than that of free contract. The problem of social control in Jewry was therefore acute and com­ pounded by the absence in Exilic Jewry of an established aristocracy or of any other form of clearly defined governing class. The Jews had long been without an Exilarch and had no bishops or regular, continent-wide, let alone worldwide, synods. High moral and legal authority accrued to particular rabbinical figures from time to time as a function of their reputation for very great learning and integrity; and their status relative to lesser colleagues can loosely—but only loosely and informally—be considered hierarchical. But towering figures such as Gershom Me’or ha-Golah of Mainz (960—1028), Levi ben Gershom of Orange (Gersonides, 1288-1344), and perhaps greatest ofall Moshe ben Maimon ofCor­ doba, Fez, and Cairo (Maimonides, 1135-1204) were rare at all times. In the period closer to our own age only Eliyahu ben Shelomo Zalman, the so-called Ga’on of Vilna (1720-97), may reasonably, if still distandy and to some extent retrospectively, be compared with the luminaries of the medieval period. And there were intrinsic difficulties about rabbinical (or theocratic) governance anyway. In Jewish orthodoxy’s remote, heroic past the rule had been that rab­ binic learning, no matter how great, implied neither office nor liveli­ hood. The Sages of antiquity were artisans and cultivators. Maimonides, the greatest of mediaeval Jewish scholars, was a practising physician. But ifthis ideal was not forgotten, as the embodiment ofa rule ofconduct that it was incumbent upon all to follow, it fell into disuse. By early modern times the usual pattern was for rabbi-scholars to devote themselves to their religious-communal functions exclusively; and therefore for all but the most prestigious, or the independently wealthy, or the most ascetic and undemanding, to be in some degree dependent upon—in certain cases at the mercy of—the leading lay members of the community they were called upon to serve and guide. The tendency—evident even in antiquity—to consider that especially devout and pious men did well to refrain from dealing with mundane affairs may have played a role as well. By the end of the eighteenth century, in any event, it was the case almost everywhere that the effective leadership of European Jewish commu­ nities was either in the hands of lay members and rabbis jointly or had devolved on to laymen alone. Thus, at least for public purposes, the rabbis (except in matters of a strict moral or ritual nature) retained little more than a residual moral influence in matters that were thought to be of particularly great moment and upon which they, for their part, were prepared to go so far as to define a clear position. In brief, the effective

12

INTRODUCTION

day-to-day leadership of Jewry, especially in times of distress and crisis and actual or impending copflict, had virtually everywhere fallen into the hands of the man of material substance, the gevir.

IV The special force in old regime Jewry of authority and influence derived from the accumulation of wealth lay first and foremost in the fact that, apart from rabbinic learning and (more doubtfully) craftsmanship of certain kinds, no other path to significant, public personal achievement existed. That apart, a man who had accumulated wealth was held ipsofacto to be of proven ability. The successful accumulation of wealth suggested a battle with alien forces that had been fought and won; and further, that having done such battle the man of substance was necessarily a man with access of some kind—and if of great substance then substantial access— to the men who really made the weather in his world: the territorial mag­ nates, the sovereign’s ministers and lesser servants, perhaps the sovereign himself. It followed that his own community would look to the gevir for more than the simple material, philanthropic support of its institutions that he and they knew he owed it. The interdependency between per­ sonal wealth and personal access to the centres of power in the land led naturally to the expectation that he would perform the additional pious duty of shtadlanut (intercession on the community’s behalf). The actual economic roles and achievements of the various gevirim-shtadlanim, the grandees ofJewry, differed greatly, of course, in kind and degree, much as did the political and social status and the economic resources of their respective political masters. Still, in their significance to their commu­ nities, the duties of the Jewish bailiff managing a Polish landowner’s estates, the organizer and purveyor of supplies to an eighteenth-century military commander in the field, and the ‘court Jew’ (Hofjude) serving the ruler of a petty German state as personal financial adviser and opera­ tor, were all of a kind. Two men who were especially remarkable for having known how to seize their opportunities and achieve personal wealth and political con­ nections in the manner that was for some three centuries the commonest of all bases on which the prestige and power of lay leadership in Jewry rested were Sir Solomon de Medina (c. 1650-1730) and Samuel Oppen­ heimer (1630—1703). Both were military provisioners to European armies in the field, an important class of Jewish entrepreneurs whose strength lay in the connections and trust in which they held each other and their unrivalled ability to locate and purchase the supplies demanded arid deEver them to mibtary commanders with (by the standards of the times) extraordinary speed and reliabriity. Medina was a Dutch Jew of

THE OLD DISPENSATION

13

Portuguese origin settled in England who made a name and a fortune for himself as a leading member of an entire syndicate of Dutch-Portuguese Jews who operated as military provisioned and financiers (providiteurs) first to William Ill’s forces in Flanders and later to those of the Duke of Marlborough during the War of the Spanish Succession. Typically, upon his arrival in London he was elected to a position of authority in the local Jewish (Spanish and Portuguese) community as a matter of course. The community was small and on the whole untroubled and little was required of him beyond regular contributions to the upkeep of the synagogue and to the usual charitable and educational purposes. Still, the potential for intercession in case of need was there and it was taken for granted in his community that he would serve it and that, in one way or another, some­ thing of his glory would be reflected to the benefit of its members. Medina’s career was not without its share ofscandal. He was accused at one point of having bribed Marlborough to enter into a contractual rela­ tionship with him, although how far the charges against him (as opposed to the parallel charges against Marlborough himself) were fair in the cir­ cumstances is open to question. He seems to have overreached himself financially too. Nevertheless, the treatment accorded him by his masters in King William’s and then Queen Anne’s England—the key to his pos­ ition—was remarkable and quite unlike that which was meted out to Oppenheimer in late seventeenth-century Habsburg Vienna. When Medina, with all his ‘goods and merchandise’, was admitted to England in 1672 he and his family were formally and without discernible fuss or opposition granted ‘all privileges and freedoms of a natural born subject’. By the end of the century his position was such that the king himself was prepared to pay him a visit at his home in Richmond. A year later, in June 1700, he was awarded a knighthood, the first professing Jew to be so hon­ oured. This in turn did something to establish if not a binding precedent at any rate a new way of thinking about the status of the Jews in British society. When in 1712 a Scottish court of law was faced with a plea to dis­ allow the evidence of a Jew on the grounds that Jews were ‘inhabile in law, considering the rooted hatred they bear all Christians’, the judge, with Medina in mind, held that if ‘a Jew trading in London’ could be knighted and so manifestly rated ‘capable of honours’, there was no evi­ dent reason why the witness or any other Jew should be thought of as incapable of bearing testimony.11 Samuel Oppenheimer was a man of greater substance than Medina, but his strength too rested before all else on his capacity to lead and co­ ordinate lesser men of his own kind.12 He was a native of Heidelberg. His " Oskar K. Rabinowicz, Sir Solomon Medina (London, 1974), 2, 20. 12 Anat Peri, ‘Pe'ilutam shel sapakei zava yehudiim be-mamlekhet hungaria bamahazit ha-rishona shel ha-me’ah ha-18’, Zion, 57, 2 (1992).

14

INTRODUCTION

commercial and financial career began with service as a military purveyor to the Elector of the Palatinate. It then progressed, by stages, to the pos­ ition of principal, at certain times virtually sole, officially designated pur­ veyor to the entire Austrian army in its wars against the French and the Turks. The sheer, virtually continent-wide scale of the financial and logistic operations which he undertook to see through either alone or with carefully chosen partners was staggering. By 1694 the Austrian state debt to Oppenheimer alone amounted to no less than 3 million florins. At his death, by his son Emmanuel’s estimate, it had reached double that figure. But it needs to be said too that Oppenheimer’s case demonstrates much more closely than Medina’s, and in ways more characteristic of his class, that while the material and social rewards that accrued to men who conducted enterprises on such a scale could not fail to be very real, the penalties for failure or loss of favour were correspondingly severe. Oppenheimer was granted the then exceedingly rare right of residence in Vienna. His wealth and (fluctuating) access to high quarters enabled him to pursue his interests with diligence and at the same time do something to protect and re-settle Jews who had fallen on evil times in consequence of the central European wars, to ransom Jewish captives in the timehonoured manner prescribed by tradition, and to obtain for at least some of his brethren the same prize of residence in Vienna that had been granted him. But the award of the bureaucratic (non-noble) title of Oberkriegsfaktor was a step taken, like all moves favouring him, in the teeth of great opposition, especially from clerical quarters. He had continually to cope with intrigues and vilification of a nastily anti-Jewish kind. There was no compunction when he was at one point out of favour about expelling the great man (and great servant of the Habsburg crown) from Vienna along with the rest of the small collection (hardly a community) ofJews who had at one time or another been privileged to reside there. Towards the end of his life he suffered the still greater indignity of the mob being allowed to sack his unprotected mansion in Vienna. And while the imperial authorities were ready enough to use him from time to time, they made repeated attempts to repudiate the enormous debts they owed him both in his lifetime and, later, beyond the grave—on the grounds that Oppenheimer had cooked his books and was guilty of other fraudulent and underhand manipulations. The charges were never sub­ stantiated; and it does not seem that anyone of great consequence ever believed the allegations to be true. Moreover, the chief and most inter­ esting result of the government’s repudiation of its debt to Oppenheimer was the major financial crisis that erupted throughout central Europe and the subsequent damage done to the financial credit of the Habsburg Empire.’3 But the intrinsic fragility of a Jewish grandee’s position cannot ” Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550-1750 (Oxford, 1985), 124—7; and Henry Wasserman, EncyclopaediaJudaica, xii, cols. 1431—3.

THE OLD DISPENSATION

15

be better demonstrated. For all its brilliance, Oppenheimers career was almost fatally shot through with insecurity and uncertainty of status and clearly showed up the advantages that accrued to the employer of an agent, factor, bailiff, purveyor, or any other kind of middle man who was a Jew. Such a man was always less likely to obtain justice than another, or even dare demand it. In the event of a dispute or of the relevant operation going sour, he was ideally suited for the role of the party on to whom criticism could most easily be deflected. A classic example of this precarious position was that key figure in con­ temporary eastern Europe’s peasant economy: the manager—bailiff or arendar (leaseholder)—of the Polish nobleman’s estates, a man caught per­ petually between his landowner-master’s unremitting demands for rent and profit and the dark and equally dangerous hostility of the peasantry on whose labour all and everything ultimately turned. For those success­ ful in such an enterprise there was a living to be had—no small thing in increasingly impoverished Polish Jewry. For the unsuccessful there could be dire punishment. On the very great estates the position of the Jewish leaseholder might be, indeed needed to be if any good was to come of it to anyone, one of extraordinary power—over the lesser Jews inhabiting the landowner’s towns and villages no less than over the peasants. But it was a position inexorably marked and damned at every level by tyranny, fear, manipulation, and resentment. The brothers Shemuel and Gedaliya Izakowicz, leaseholders and factors on the immense estates of Hieronim Radziwill, were notorious both for their managerial efficiency and eco­ nomic good sense and for the hatred and the fear they inspired in serfs and lesser Jews alike. Their efficacy as factors owed everything to their fig­ urative and literal ability to whip everyone into an unprecedented frenzy of labour, productivity, and profit. They did so at the behest and on the authority of their Radziwill master; they did so, of course, on their own behalf as well. Unsurprisingly, they were nearly brought down by the wave of peasant rebellion and accompanying pogroms that extended sporadically over the years 1739-44,'4 that was as much a reaction against them personally as against the Radziwills themselves. But if their ability to control the peasants and, indirecdy, the minor noblemen caught up in the effort to rationalize the management of the Radziwill estates was shaky for a time, their absolute mastery of the equally resentful Jewish population over whom they had, in effect, been placed in authority was never in question. But nor, as it needs to be said too, was there any ques­ tion of their perfectly genuine, active concern for the safety of their own people so far as it was in their power to ensure it. 14 Known in Polish-Jewish annals as ‘Gzeirat Woszczylo’, on which see I. Halpern, ‘Gzeirat Woszczylo’, Ziony 22, 1 (1957), 56-67; and Hillel Levine, Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and itsJews in the Early Modem Period (New Haven, 1991), 157-8.

16

INTRODUCTION

Another large figure, comparable to Oppenheimer and Medina, but no less illustrative than the brothers Izakowicz of the savage and unsettled conditions that obtained in eastern Europe, especially in independent Poland during its decline, was Shemu’el Zbitkower (173?-1801). Notable as a purveyor to the Polish, Russian, and Polish-insurgent armies in suc­ cession, he was a man with a finger in a great many other commercial pies—with trade in meat, hides, and horses among them.15 Of great wealth, immense energy, a very sharp eye for business, and few scruples, Zbitkower, crucially, had friends and protectors in very high places, the corrupt royal minister Adam Poninski and King Stanislaw Augustus Poniatowski himself (to whom he was formally appointed ‘crown ser­ vant’) among them. He further conformed to the pattern of the gevir in that he insisted on a role of power and influence in the world ofJewry as well. He had himself appointed parnas (elder) of Warsaw Jewry and func­ tioned for a time as its tax-farmer. He sought and obtained the right to establish a cemetery in Warsaw—a fine achievement had it not been fol­ lowed by his asserting personal control of its use and exploiting even this small increment of influence for private profit. Yet, like the equally awful brothers Izakowicz half a century earlier, Zbitkower made great efforts and expended much private wealth to protect the Jews of the Praga sub­ urb of Warsaw when the Cossacks were let loose upon them in the course of the Russians’ suppression of the Kosciuszko rising in 1794.16 The advent of the gevir or grandee as the dominant oligarch in Jewry during the final centuries of the old regime introduced an active factor within it that had hitherto been relatively rare. Thirsty for status and priv­ ileges and for avenues of influence that were not only beyond the access and the ken, but also, by and large, the imagining of lesser folk in Jewry, the gevir would be associated, as we shall see, with the first stirrings ofsuch demand as there was from within Jewry for a lasting solution to the prob­ lem of civil and political status. The question he needed to face was whether the demand should be on behalf of Jews of all classes and cat­ egories indiscriminately or limited to improvement in the status ofhis own kind alone. No clear, let alone definitive and agreed, answer was forth­ coming, but a petition submitted to the Prussian government in 1787 by Jewish representatives, in the semi-mercantilist terms that, as they rightly judged, the authorities were most likely to digest, argued the latter case. If one of our co-religionists was the one who founded the first silk factory in our country . . and if others followed his example and founded a very respectable number [eine ansehnliche Menge] of factories of all kinds in the land; if as a result of their industry and application thousands of Christian families 15 And Henri Bergson’s great-grandfather. «16 On Zbitkower’s career see especially Emanuel Ringelblum, ‘Shemu'el Zbitkover; ‘askan pburi-kalkali be-folin bi-imei halukata’, Zion, 3, 3 and 4 (1938)—one of the last articles by that much lamented scholar to be published in his lifetime (1900-44).

THE OLD DISPENSATION

17

earn their living, why then surely they [the Jewish entrepreneurs] are not idle or useless, or a burden on the State, but subjects who contribute to its true pros­ perity. ... In which case, [is it just that] they or their descendants be treated as foreigners?17

What was ominous about this, from the point of view of the Jewish community in question, but also, by extension, any Jewish community, was the identification of the long-term interests of those for whom, legit­ imately or otherwise, the spokesmen were determined to speak with what were patently their own private material interests. Where the accepted spokesmen for the community had once been men who could, it was commonly thought, be relied upon by reason of their close obser­ vance of the rules of piety and religion and their active membership in what were still, even in western and central Europe, traditionalist com­ munities, it would now, increasingly, be on men who were likely to be ever more remote socially and mentally from the commonalty ofJewry that all would have to rely: a circumstance that would unfailingly breed new forms of dissension and distrust.

V

While the structure and patterns ofthe political life ofthe Jews in the final stages of the old regime were especially marked by the clerical leadership ofJewry giving way to leadership by plutocracy, the fundamental prin­ ciples of public action—and, rather more famously, inaction—that had been so great a part of the legacy of the Sages had in no sense faded from Jewish minds. Least of all was this the case in respect of the most deeply inculcated and the most powerful of all ancient precepts, the rule ofpolit­ ical self-abnegation. At its most basic this took the simple form encapsulated in the Tal­ mudic Sages’ injunction to eschew the political and keep a proper dis­ tance from the power in the land, the rashut. It was their teaching that the affairs and, indeed, the very vicinity of the rashut were fraught with dan­ ger, moral confusion, and corruption. To frequent it was to be deflected from man’s proper business—this being the study of, and obedience to, the Law. ‘Love labour and hate mastery, and seek not acquaintance with the ruling power’ (Shemaiah). ‘A name made great is a name destroyed ... and he that studies not is worthy of death’ (Hillel). ‘Be heedful of the ruling power for they bring no man nigh to them save for their own need: they seem to be friends such time as it is to their gain, but they stand not 17 Quoted in M. Bodian, ‘Ha-yazamim ha-yehudiim be-Berlin, ha-medina haabsolutistit, ve-“shipur ma?avam ha-ezrahi shel ha-yehudim” ba-maba?it ha-sheniya shel ha-me ah ha-18’, Zion, 49, 2 (1984), 181-2. Emphasis added.

18

INTRODUCTION

with a man in his time of stress’ (Rabban Gamaliel).18 The philosophic resignation proper in men and women who believed themselves to be in the hands of a personal god dictated no less. But if political quietism was taught as the acme of both prudence and piety, its remoter, deeper implications, namely that to avoid political thought, afortiori political action, was to eschew the proper investigation and assessment of one’s own resources as well as those of one’s opponents, were rarely examined. There was thus a conspicuous lack of practical seriousness and system in Jewish thinking on public affairs, a tendency too to refrain from a large and comprehensive view of things, to cleave to the immediate, the limited, the palpable, and, especially in moments of crisis, to think insistently in terms of the tactical rather than the long term and the strategic. None of this was unconnected with the doctrine that the history of the Jewish people was one of reward and punishment: that it needed to be interpreted in terms of Jewry’s putative cosmological, chiliastic role; that the Exile being divinely ordained punishment, the eventual, redemptory Return would be in the nature of a pardon and a rehabilitation; that all hinged in any case on divine intervention; and that, in the long meanwhile, good and strict behaviour was all. Where such a view of the world lies at the root of social vision a tendency to avoid rather than engage in the political is probably inevitable—in which connection there needs again to be recalled the compensatory merit traditionally attached in Jewry to the close study of the Law. For apart from its many intrinsic merits, it offered the finest minds in Jewry the surest of all means of escape from the vulgar, the mundane, and so, by natural extension, from the public-political as well. There was, however, an aspect of this negativism which may be termed proto-anarchistic. The state that held ultimate power over the Jews was perceived, correctly of course, as alien and, as a general rule, hostile, unjust, and threatening as well. The Jews’ own internal structures of gov­ ernment, in telling contrast, were, as we shall see, intrinsically weak, uncertain, often bullying, or all three together; but above all, even with the best of intentions, they were incapable of according their people the protection against the predators preying upon them that they so urgently required. It followed that while obedience was the prevailing rule, the European Jew, in his heart of hearts, by the circumstances ofhis birth, and by the impact upon him of his own people’s accumulated experience, had reason to be deeply sceptical of civil authority of all kinds, internal as well as external, and that the lasting effect of such scepticism was to leave him peculiarly independent in mind and social outlook. Having no earthly masters to whom he thought he owed unquestioning political obedience (the special case of the Hasidic rebbe or çaddik and his devotees aside), his 18 Nezikin, Avot 1: 9,13; 2: 3.

THE OLD DISPENSATION

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was therefore a spirit that, for his times, was remarkably free. Permitted no land, he had no territorial lord. Admitted to no guild, he was free of the authority of established master-craftsmen. Not being a Christian, he had neither bishop nor priest to direct him. And while he could be charged and punished for insubordination to state or sovereign, he could not properly be charged with disloyalty. Betrayal only entered into the Efe of the Jews in regard to their own community or, more broadly, to Jewry as a whole. It was to their own nation alone that they accepted that they owed undeviating loyalty. For their enduring cohesion and continuity, the individual commu­ nities scattered through Christian Europe19 relied in part on the internal­ ization of specific doctrine and historical experience handed down from generation to generation, on the constant, daily reinforcing effect ofritual, and on the real, often bitter circumstances of membership in a pariah community. But they relied no less on a general assumption of social compact and on the acceptance all round of a high degree of mutual responsibility famously encapsulated in the Talmudic maxim koi Yisrael 'arevin zeh ba-zeh (in literal translation from the Hebrew: ‘all [members of] Israel are responsible one for the other’).20 What this specially articu­ lated was the obligation of collectivities, institutions, and private individ­ uals alike to give whatever aid and protection they might be able to muster to any member or segment of the Jewish people that might be in distress—notably, although not solely, distress caused by gentile agency. To this doctrine of positive, mutual responsibility there needs to be added, however, the darker gloss that it was the way of the world anyway forJews to be held responsible for the deeds, real or alleged, ofotherJews. In both its high moral and its more pragmatic and defensive aspect, the doctrine of mutual responsibility drew therefore on the deepest possible ” Once again the case and circumstances of the Jewish communities in the Islamic world, notably in the Ottoman Empire, were somewhat different in this respect—as in many others with which this study is especially concerned. An instructive borderline case is that of the governance of the Jews in the Danubian Principalities, Moldavia and Wal­ lachia, prior to independence. There, in the Ottoman manner, Jews were organized corporatively, with very considerable internal fiscal, administrative, and judicial autonomy and led and largely ruled by a hakham bashi (chief rabbi) in Moldavia, appointed by the prince, but operating in Wallachia too through a lay deputy. The Jews, wrote two Scot­ tish observers, ‘are regarded by the Government as a separate community, and the capita­ tion tax is not levied on them individually, but from their chief men, who are left to gather the sum from their brethren in the way they think equal and fair. . . . The way in which the rulers of the Jews levy the tax is as follows: They lay it not on the provisions of the poor, but on the articles of luxury. For example, a goose is sold for about a zwanzig, but they put a tax on it of half a zwanzig and eight paras. Thus the rich, who wish luxuries, pay a high price for them; while the poor, who are content with the necessities of life, escape’ (Andrew A. Bonar and Robert Murray M’Cheyne, Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jewsfrom the Church of Scotland in 1839 (Edinburgh, 1844), 409). 20 From the Talmud, Nezikin: Shevu'ot 39a.

20

INTRODUCTION

roots of sentiment and precedent, an obligation never to be shrugged off by those in a position to fulfil it, and powerfully reinforced by the common, generally well-founded assumption that, in a largely hostile and alien world, help would indeed be forthcoming. In her famous auto­ biography, Glückei of Hameln (1645—1724) relates how Night had fallen when we landed at Delfzijl and it was too late to find lodging in an inn or even a Jew’s house. It was still stormy and we feared that nothing remained for us but to spend the night in the street. But the following day was the fast before the New Year, we had not eaten a bite all day while on shipboard, and we were still faint from our sea-sickness. So we did not relish lying in the street all night without food or drink. But presently my husband came to the house of a Jew whose brother had mar­ ried the daughter of Chaim Fürst of Hamburg and begged a night’s shelter for us and our children, so that we might have a roof over our heads at least. The man’s immediate response was, ‘Enter, in God’s name, my house is yours. I can give you a good bed, although food there is none;’ (for it was already late and his wife was away in Emden).21

At a more exalted and more urgent level than that apphcable to Glückei and her family’s need for a night’s lodging, but stemming from the same source, there was the specific rule ofpidyon shevuyim—the duty to ransom captives. In antiquity and down to early modern times this was conceived of, typically, in terms of the rescue of people unlucky enough to have been seized and held by robbers, pirates, slavers, or, as needs hardly be added, local tyrants. By extension, it came to be accepted as a duty to seek the release of any Jew thought to have been unjustly treated or detained. This was a matter on which the Talmudic Sages and later commentators had laid down precise priorities: the ransoming ofwomen preceded that of men, the rescue of one’s teacher came before that of one’s father, the ransoming of captives of any category came before the otherwise primary duty of dispensing charity to the poor; and to delay performance of the duty of pidyon shevuyim, let alone avoid it, was to be guilty of a wickedness as great and unforgivable as that of the spilling of blood. The obligation to attempt the relief of an entire community in dis­ tress was of course doubly and trebly compelling, as the speed and energy with which all those who could do so proceeded to contribute their mite of influence to save the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia from the threat­ ened horrors of Maria Theresa’s decree of banishment served to illustrate. It followed, of course, that to fail in the performance of such a welldefined social duty was to incur the great displeasure and disapproval of the community. So too in respect of other obligations. In general, the greater the failure to abide by accepted norms, the greater the displeasure, naturally enough, and the greater too the urge to 21 Glückei of Hameln, Memoirs, trans. Marvin Lowenthal (New York, 1977), 102-3.

THE OLD DISPENSATION

21

inflict condign punishment. In extreme cases the punishment inflicted would be equally extreme—and none greater than that meted out to the malshin: the delator or informer, the carrier of tales to the alien authority. True or false, straight or crooked, ostensibly plausible or obvious fabrica­ tion—a story of any kind, but the darker the better provided it had emanated from within the closed (and to the alien mind ominous) world of the Jews, was always grist to the perpetually revolving mills of mis- and dis-information about them. There was no knowing what report or rumour or evident piece of nonsense might be brought before, and pounced upon by, prince or bishop or landowning magnate or mere policeman, or city burgher or village priest, or indeed by anyone who had a doctrinal or material interest in the dispossession or expulsion or simple liquidation of the Jews as the enemies of God and man; or had a quarrel with any actual Jew whom he or she faced day to day, whose property he or she coveted; or whose supposed influence on innocent Christian folk he or she resented; or whom, for deeper reasons of inerad­ icable prejudice and psychological need, he or she was intent on holding responsible for the ills of society at large. The hatred, contempt, and fear in which the malshin was held by his own people were therefore bound­ less and the vengeance to which he rendered himself liable correspond­ ingly implacable. He and all like renegades were consigned not only popularly but textually and ex cathedra to eternal damnation. The prayer ‘And let the delators despair’ remains (to this day, it may be added) an integral part of the Eighteen Benedictions, the observant Jew’s regular morning prayer. Exceptionally, moreover, in the otherwise profoundly quietistic and pacific culture of exilic Jewry, violent revenge was Hable to follow verbal condemnation. Delation was authoritatively seen as one of the rare forms of villainy that called for execution, death being not only right and proper in such a case, but expedient.22 No other form of social or reHgious dissidence was treated with such ferocity, although the penal­ ties for lesser, but still serious instances of dissidence could be severe enough. It needs to be borne in mind in this connection that members of a traditional community were bound to one another not only by religious faith and practice, birth and situation, but by general culture. Until quite modern times, few Jews in any part of Europe had more than such limited knowledge of the language of a country, namely the language of their gentile neighbours, as might be necessary to conduct commercial 22 In the nature of things, documented case-histories of malshinim who were put to death are rare, although not so rare, in relatively modern times at any rate, as to leave in doubt the actual practice of punitive execution. See, for example, the account of execu­ tions done in Ushitz (now Novaya Ushitsa, in the Ukraine) in 1836, and the correspond­ ing efforts of the Russian authorities to uncover the affair, in David Assaf, Derekh ha-malkhut: R. Yisrael me-Ruzhin u-mekomo be-toledot ha-hasidut (Jerusalem, 1997), 163-75.

22

INTRODUCTION

transactions with them. Even this rarely extended to the ability to read and write in the vernacular. Fewer still had direct experience—and therefore correct and reasonably detailed knowledge—of non-Jewish society as such, of its forms and rules, its mores, or indeed anything at all ofsocial and cultural importance about it, except what, at the most super­ ficial level, they might have gained in the course of daily commercial or administrative dealings. Least of all did Jews, through the long stretch of time in which general culture was closely intertwined and interdepend­ ent with religion, have more than the vaguest glimmerings of the content of Christianity, or indeed any interest in it. Even the barriers to profes­ sional and strictly secular association between Jews and non-Jews, set, for example, by the universal refusal to admit Jews to the guilds, tended to be virtually impenetrable, the more so as Jews were commonly limited to trades and professions in which they had perforce to operate alone or exclusively in the company of other Jews. Finally the workings of the ghetto system of physical enclosure in what can fairly be termed locked and barred night-time urban cages, while never universal in Europe, had profound socio-psychological consequences for all as the most vivid articulation of how Christendom regarded them. Except for the rarest and boldest and most rebellious of spirits, a clear departure from the com­ munity, a venture out into the wider, unfamiliar, intimidating world of the gentiles, especially if, as was so often the case, it was in some way interlocked with the prospect or obligation of apostasy, was thus not only fraught with immense, practical difficulties, but was for the overwhelm­ ing majority no less than unthinkable. The loyalty ofJews to their own people might seem to some outsiders, and here and there, in their heart of hearts, to some Jews as well, to be incomprehensible. But it was the Archimedean point on which virtually all else in their private and collec­ tive life turned. Outright rebellion was exceedingly rare. When it occurred, it could, as often as not, even in the face of countervailing external support for the rebel, be made to collapse. Consider the case of Yizhak Rofeh, called to order in 1732 by the elders of the Amtchislav (Mstislavl) community in Byelorussia, then under Polish rule, for his ‘evil’ conduct. Rofeh had aroused his leaders’ wrath by frequenting members of the local Polish nobility and, horrible to recount, going so far, with his wife in tow, as to dance with them. Sum­ moned before the elders to be rebuked he had further transgressed by fail­ ing to treat them with the respect they believed to be their due. On the contrary, he had been so bold as to appear before them in the company of his Polish patron and, as the communal minute book recorded, speak ‘wickedly and rudely’ to them—in his Polish protector’s hearing and for his benefit, moreover, and slanderously too. Yizhak Rofeh and his wife, ‘may her name be wiped out’, were thereupon proscribed. No Jew was to enter their dwelling place. None was to break bread with them. Their

THE OLD DISPENSATION

23

sons were to be removed from school. Their property was for the taking. They were, in effect, placed without the law and beyond the pale so far as all ofJewry was concerned; and Eke penalties were imposed on any Jew who was so presumptuous as to violate the terms of the ban in the villain’s favour. The Amtchislav communal minute book records that Yi?bak responded ferociously to the judgement meted out to him, that he expressed himself in ‘words that cannot be put in writing’, and that he went on to compound his original fault and his very great sins by com­ plaining to unnamed ‘rulers who were estabEshed enemies of the Jews’ (local landowners or churchmen, in all probability), bearing false tales to them. At that point the advantage passed to Yiçhak who so worked on his PoEsh protectors that one of their number, having ordered an elder of the community to appear before him, set upon the poor man, and flogged him ‘near to death and before all’. But Yi?hak did not hold the advantage for long, nor was this the end of the story, or, as Simon Dubnov observed of the case, where its interest Ees. Despite the support and protection accorded him by his PoEsh patrons, despite, as it appears, their having half accepted him socially along with his wife, and despite what must have been the fury and indignation of the communal leadership faced with one who, over and above his improper social behaviour, had been pre­ pared so flagrantly to violate the rules of group loyalty on which Jewish society had relied from time immemorial, the ban on Yi?hak and his wife was eventuaUy rescinded. When or on what grounds this was done, or even whether it was in the Efetime of the rebeUious couple or later, at the behest of their children, remains unclear. What is known, because duly noted in the communal minute book, is that an act of repentance of some sort was performed and accepted.23 What can be presumed is that the disgrace proved unbearable even to the ‘evil’ and unruly Yi?hak Rofeh. It can be presumed too that this was very well understood by the communal authorities and accounts at least in part for what they them­ selves must have regarded as an appropriate display of lenience. Life under ban of excommunication for one who would not or could not bring himself to apostatize was indeed intolerable and in many ways impossible. There could be no marriage, divorce, schooEng for his chil­ dren, burial of the family’s dead, or effective observance of the dietary laws by the living. There could be no professional or economic relations with other Jews. To be under the ban was to be cast out, condemned to a terrible loneliness, and in all likelihood to poverty too, in a world that had become doubly hostile. The power to place its members, however well placed and protected, under the ban was therefore power enough to induce aU but the most determined rebels to knuckle under to those who held what aU others in the community accepted as legitimate authority. It 23 S. M. Dubnov, ‘Fun mayn arkhiv’, YIVO Bletter, 1 (Jan-May 1931), 405-7.

24

INTRODUCTION

was the sharpest of the disciplinary weapons ordinarily available to the communal authorities. In some ways it remains the most instructive. There were others, however: fines, withdrawal of social privileges, and, as we shall see, in the special case of Russia under Nicholas I, the prefer­ ential drafting of young men and boys for lifetime military service. Cor­ poral punishment, while rare, was not unknown.

VI

Sporadic rebellion apart, communal self-government faced the difficulty that it needed to be more than merely virtuous to be effective. It could not be populist. It could not, strictly speaking, be popular. There was no way in which it could model itself on the patterns of government and authority, country-wide or local, that were common in the world outside Jewry. Given the general prohibition on ownership of land by Jews and their exclusion from the estates of the realm under the old regime it could not in any ordinary and regularized sense be aristocratic or hereditary. It could not be theocratic in anything like the sense associated with the Christian churches: rabbis were not priests serving as the indispensable mediators between man and God; they were no more than judges and experts in the Law. It is true that in principle a rabbi is free and independ­ ent in his judgement, bound only by the Law and that, as a Master of the Law, his moral authority is in principle immeasurable. Of course, the Law itself can be variously interpreted, as we have seen. Pressures of time and place and circumstance may induce the rabbi to soften or deflect its impact. Not all rabbis are of equal calibre. Few among them are of inde­ pendent means. The lay members of the community who elect the rabbi to his office and whose duty it is to sustain him materially are capable of bringing pressures of their own to bear upon him. And beyond the risk of malleable mediocrity, there is the danger the rabbis themselves are the first to recognize, that incompatible interpretations of the Law lead inex­ orably to loss of rigour, precisely that feature of the Law that they were trained to hold in reverence and protect with special zeal. The overwhelming tendency of the rabbinate has therefore been to seek safety in consensus. The governing rule of conduct and articulated judgement has been to refrain from straying from what is acceptable to one’s fellows, to keep to whatever passes for the mainstream of opinion, to avoid, at almost any cost, the marginal, the eccentric, and the minoritarian. Wisdom, in short, is encapsulated in the Mishnaic injunction aharei rabbn lehatot (which, somewhat roughly and removed from its

THE OLD DISPENSATION

25

immediate context, has been taken to mean ‘follow the majority’).24 Some, to be sure, may think that there may be discerned in this dictum at least a hint of what in our own times is thought of as the democratic duty to have a decent regard for opinion at large. In practice, the chief opera­ tive, long-term result of obeisance to it has been further consolidation of the (orthodox) rabbinate as deeply conformist and intellectually and theologically unadventurous—although, to be sure, a class of men who by and large are united on essentials and, with the rarest of exceptions, high-minded and incorruptible. That it has only been by the exercise of great judgemental rigour that the coherence ofjudaism as a doctrine and as a pattern of conduct, and the cohesion of the Jews themselves as a people, has been maintained came to be held on both the rabbinic and the lay sides of Jewry as a social doctrine that admitted no question or qualification. What it did nothing to help determine was the answer to another fundamental question. Who in practice was to lead Jewry when the issues confronting it were not bound up in the petty details of ritual, private conduct, and personal status, but were those concerning the wel­ fare and safety of entire living communities? 24 Nezikin: Sanhedrin, 1: 6. However, as has long been noted, the same phrase is employed in the Book of Exodus (23: 2) to imply the opposite, namely as a warning against mere numbers—effectively the majority opinion—-being allowed to determine judgement and leave the way open to the perversion ofjustice.

PART I

Integration and Fragmentation

principal engine of change in the modern history of the Jews of Europe was the revolutionary idea that it might after all be right and proper for them to enjoy full and equal civil and political rights with all other subjects of the several realms that they inhabited. A turned, therefore, in the final analysis on the matter of emancipation: on where and on what terms it was offered to them; on where and with what consequences it was, on the contrary, denied; and on where and how and with what implications, having first been granted, it would later be with­ drawn. But in all cases, it sufficed for the question of emancipation to have been posed to call the ancient structure of relations between the Jews and the state and between the Jews and their neighbours into question— to most lasting effect on the Jews themselves. No other factor operating upon them in modern times would serve so powerfully to precipitate such revolutionary changes in their mores, their culture, their internal social structure, and, more generally and loosely, their private and collec­ tive concerns and expectations. The introduction of the simple notion that their political circumstances not only could, but perhaps should, be otherwise was to leave them in the course of little more than a single cen­ tury transformed. Some within Jewry welcomed the prospect of radical internal and external change. Others were profoundly repelled by it. But like it or not, all would consistently and at an ever higher level of inten­ sity be confronted by choices of a kind for which no precedents were to be found either in their history or in their Law. And in important cases the problem posed was the more difficult to deal with by reason of the ambiguity of what was offered them and the accompanying obscurity of ultimate intention. Where formal, open, and explicit legislative deter­ mination of their status was the case they were apt to find actual imple­ mentation patchy and reluctant. Where a frank and clear-cut reordering of their position was denied them—on grounds of high Christian prin­ ciple, for example—there, in contrast, it was not impossible to find that a somewhat shadowy approximation to an outright grant of a decent place in civil society had been granted them after all. Where state and society were both firmly against civil equality and sought to subject the Jews and their affairs to an order founded essentially on the same repressive basis as that of old, there Jews, some of them, at all events, would be moved— unprecedentedly, and to some minds belatedly—to rebellion. It would be he

T

30

INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

a very long time, and not until the end of the fourth decade of the twen­ tieth century, that these mixed, contradictory, always deeply controver­ sial results would be swept away, and clarity, albeit of a kind that relatively few on either side of the divide had originally anticipated, would be restored.

1 Proposals i

T can be said of the Jews of Europe that as late as the final decades of the eighteenth century they all displayed substantially similar political, social, and economic features. For this reason among others, the question of their admission to civil society appeared to lend itself to being cast—and at any rate debated—in terms of universal application. Where it was so conceived, there, as we shall see, it appeared to admit of corres­ pondingly clear and unambiguous answers. Initially, such were the terms on which the Jews themselves tended to approach the question and the relatively simple operative conclusions they were apt to draw depended on whether they judged the prospect of emancipation a blessing or a curse. However, what the Jews thought of the matter counted for very litde. At least a century would pass before Jews of any standing anywhere in Europe were in a position to play a role of some import in those polit­ ical arenas, large or small, in which their fate, and the matter of their emancipation in particular, was the subject of debate. Even then the influence they were able to bring to bear in their own cause would prove to be exceedingly limited. The power to bestow the gift (if gift it was) of emancipation or, contrariwise, to withhold it lay exclusively with others—with the governments of the day in the first instance, of course, but no less fundamentally, if less directly, with those elements of society to which those who held formal power were inclined to lend an ear. In general, the approach to the matter of the emancipation of the Jews tended to correspond to the favoured approach to other major aspects of political and constitutional policy. Where the balance of opinion (and eventual policy) tended towards decisions being founded on principled, a priori, moral, and therefore, in a loose sense, philosophical consider­ ations, the question of the Jews was likely to be taken up in a similar spirit. Where social and political debate leaned towards the pragmatic, the specific, the local, and the historical—and therefore the idiosyncratic— there the approach to the Jews was likely to be of a similar nature. In all cases it was a question of balance. No state or society dealt with the matter of the Jews in one exclusive mode. All tended very strongly to mix considerations of interest with what were at any rate thought of as mat­ ters of principle. Only the proportions varied.

I

32

INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

From the end of the eighteenth century, the tendency in all the major continental states of Europe was to aspire to a powerfully centralizing, rationalized, internal ordering of society. One largely incidental conse­ quence was to encourage government to take a fresh look at its country’s Jewish population. The purpose, typically, was to formulate an attitude, even a policy, towards the Jews that was in keeping with whatever were considered to be the broad and binding principles on which government and the social order as a whole ought properly to be based. While the spe­ cific rules and considerations thought applicable in each case varied, the central, underlying intention was everywhere much the same. All strove for coherence. The one social value none were prepared to eschew was order. The difficulty about the Jews was that, over and above all the old objections to their presence, they seemed to present an insuperable obstacle to the establishment ofjust such a coherent, smoothly operating, centrally directed social order as was striven for. Here and there the ques­ tion whether they were likely, in significant numbers and in some fore­ seeable future, to abandon their faith and convert without equivocation to Christianity would be posed. But underlying the old insistence on the truth of Christianity and the corresponding errors of Judaism was the secular, socio-political conviction that the Jews could no longer be allowed—for their own good, but more especially for the good of society at large—to continue in their set and ancient manner. To be sure, there was nothing new in the notion that they were a profoundly anomalous people. What was new; what would now gather force and lie close to the heart of the matter of their eventual emancipation, was the view that an anomaly of the kind they represented, and continued so very wilfully to perpetuate, needed finally to be done away with. This alien, apparently indigestible element in society was always and everywhere in society and in the state, but never properly of either one or the other. The problem it presented must therefore be addressed first and foremost in political terms as one ofthe aspects ofsociety that needed to be tidied up. For some ofthe statesmen and for many administrators concerned, tidiness was indeed all. There was therefore something in this approach that was simplistic, brutal, and proto-totalitarian. And, in general, it was certainly the case that the light in which the matter of the Jews was chiefly seen was defined much less by considerations of their welfare than by raison d'état. Expedi­ ency, efficacy of administration, economic and, as it were, military mer­ cantilism, and, above all, social control—these were the decisive criteria. The spirit in which the Jews’ affairs were discussed, when discussed at all, by those who were in a position to decide upon them was étatist and rationalist. The dominant considerations were the welfare and efficiency of the state itself: the state as structure and as machine, the state as one of a number of competing states. Pragmatism boiled down therefore to rulers and administrators reluctantly conceding that awkward and

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regrettable though it might be to have Jews present among them, it was neither possible nor, in fact, desirable not to bear them in mind. On the contrary, a defined, fixed, and intelligible place had to be found for them. They too had to render the state the services that were its due. They had to be allowed—rather, they had to be encouraged and if necessary com­ pelled—to move towards social uniformity with all the other subjects of the realm. In a word, the Jews needed to be brought at long last within the orbit of central administration. Social (and of course fiscal and military) control of the Jews themselves would be enhanced thereby; but so would the general structure of society and its overall amenability to rational and efficacious government. But if an ostensibly rational, value-free, étatist approach informed the governing circles of the major European states in their approach to the matter of the Jews from the middle of the eighteenth century until the dying days of all three surviving continental empires early in the twenti­ eth century, it will be found to have been shot through and through with certain set convictions about them. Again and again in the reports of dis­ trict governors and policemen, in discussion papers, in the comments superior officials noted on the margins of documents submitted by their inferiors, in travellers’ accounts, in the literary delineation of Jewish characters, and in the course of general conversation on those not too fre­ quent occasions when the Jews and their affairs cropped up, Jews tended overwhelmingly to be regarded—and, in effect, dismissed—as an incor­ rigibly inferior lot. Nothing was rarer than for those who for one reason or another addressed themselves, however briefly, to the matter of the Jews than to begin, at least implicitly—and as often as not explicidy— with the proposition that they were not only hopelessly stubborn and dif­ ficult to deal with, but in many ways depraved, ignorant, and unclean. Their religious convictions and conduct were held to be vitiated by hideous error. Their Talmud was regarded as a rag-bag of obscurities and sophisms. Whether there was more to be said for their rabbis none could rightly know, but there was little doubt that they did batten on a credu­ lous and superstitious people and that these, in turn, taken as a whole, were sickly, unproductive, in large measure parasitical, and therefore as undesirable socially as they were culturally and intellectually and, of course, morally and spiritually. They might conceivably have had other, meritorious features in the past. It was admitted by the well informed that towards the end of the tenth century there had been great numbers of Jewish physicians in Europe and that, as the director of the faculty of medicine in Vienna, Gerhart van Swieten, put it authoritatively to the Empress Maria Theresa in 1753, ‘there were even popes who availed themselves of their services.’ Although that, he then went on to explain, was in the age of barbarism and ignorance, when Greek and Roman medicine had been forgotten, and Arab medicine was in vogue, and the

34

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Jews, knowing oriental languages, had had a linguistic advantage which they proceeded to misuse by presenting themselves as more knowledgeable than they were in fact. Now, in practice, except where ‘rabbinic and cab­ balistic superstition’ worked on the credulous and the vulgar, they could no longer sustain the façade. Even in Holland, where their synagogues were regrettably ‘public’ and they were in certain circumstances treated more favourably than Catholics, they had never been allowed to enter any of the medical professions. And that, so van Swieten explained to the empress, was because Jewish surgeons were known to be incompetent and because no Dutch surgeon would take a Jew as his apprentice. Nor did he think it right to let Jews practise as mere apothecaries. ‘A nation that seeks constantly to deceive’ would take advantage of the opportunity ‘to commit innumerable and most likely undetectable acts of fraud and duplicity’.1 Attempts at a strict and systematic formulation of what, in the course of time, would be thought of as ‘the problem’ of the Jews2 were still rare in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Attitudes were loose and as often as not flippant, as much among men of influence and power as among mere observers—and their emotive content might still count for more than the empirical. Rejection, charity, revulsion, and what hap­ pened to be thought of by the people in question as right and proper and in the public spirit were all intermingled. The one common point of departure for those who claimed to know a thing or two about the Jews and sought—or were duty bound—to deal with them, was that they were a backward, unproductive, and (this was especially telling) militarily use­ less people. The one thread running through all such attitudes as chanced to be struck by the truly literate and/or the truly powerful was condes­ cension. The conventional wisdom on the Jews even at the governmental level being negative, critical, restrictive, and minatory, it was natural that a collective, blanket, and free admission of the Jewish segment of the popu­ lation into whatever it was that passed for civil society was unthinkable. For all these reasons, what the periodic flurries of official interest in the matter tended to produce was a series of awkward compromises between what seemed to rulers and officials to be dictated by new wave étatist and pragmatic notions of government and what had been carried over from older times: between ancient but still powerful, often implac­ ably hostile sentiments and judgements on the Jews and the new tendency 1 ‘Gutachten Van Swietcns an Maria Theresia’, 20 Aug. 1753, in A. F. Pribram (ed.), Urkunden und Akten zur Geschichte der Juden in Wien, Erste Abteilung, Allgemeiner Teil 1526-1847 (1849), i (Vienna and Leipzig, 1918), No. 162, 347—8. The queen’s response to the physician’s opinion was a royal instruction on 8 Sept, extending the ban on medical practice by Jews: ‘Den jüdischen Ärzten, Chirurgen, Apothekern, Bädern und Hebammen wird die Ausübung ihres Berufes auch unter Juden verboten’ (ibid. 348). 2 See below, Chapter 3.

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to look at them in a clinical light and to therapeutic purpose. The difference in tone, terminology, and content between Empress Maria Theresas Judenordnung of 5 May 1764 and her son and successor’s Toleranzpatent of 2 January 1782 will serve to mark the transition. The Judenordnung was concerned in all its forty-five clauses to instruct those few Jews who had been permitted to reside in Vienna on the terms on which they might earn their Eving, maintain a family, run a house­ hold, marry their children, and employ servants; when they were to refrain from being seen in the street (on Sundays and hoEdays before noon) and what they were to do if they chanced to be outside their homes when the Host was carried past. The tone was threatening, the termin­ ology uncompromising. The ‘privileged Jew’ (privilegirterJud) was insis­ tently distinguished from the ‘foreign Jew’ (fremder Jud). What was ‘authorized’ (bejugt) was distinguished from what was ‘unauthorized’ (unbefugt). What forms of conduct were ‘indictable’ (belangend), what misdeeds would be ‘punished’ (gestrafet), and whether by fines or by expulsion, were laid down. Throughout the text of the Ordnung, the commonest word was the negative kein. In its bureaucratic thoroughness and as an articulation of the martinet poEceman’s mind it remains a very modern document. In its inner concept of what was desirable in society it was of a piece with—and did indeed anticipate—Pope Pius VI’s stiU more degrading edict on the Jews of Rome (Editto sopra gli ebrei) ofl775. What Emperor Joseph H’s own rescript on toleration had in common with his mother’s ordinance was that it too had been most meticulously formulated in the course of extended, close discussion within the Vienna bureaucracy and that many drafts were prepared before the definitive ver­ sion was reached. Otherwise, albeit in a limited and unadventurous way, it was much more plainly the first fruit of the European Enlightenment: an act of government intended inter alia to demonstrate what a calm, rational, mildly benevolent examination of the real structure and the real needs of society led one to recognize as its, i.e. society’s, requirements. The spirit and the tone of the whole is set out in the preamble which speaks of‘Our pre-eminent attention [Unser vorzüglichsten Augenmerke]' being directed to the end that all Our subjects without distinction of nationality and religion, once they have been admitted and tolerated in our States, shall participate in common in pubEc welfare, . . . shall enjoy legal freedom, and encounter no obstacles to any honest way of gaining their Evelihood and of increasing general industriousness.

The new departure, it was asserted, followed from the fact that ‘exist­ ing laws pertaining to the Jewish nation [die jüdische Nazion] ... are not always compatible with these Our most gracious intentions’. In future,

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the government would be guided by the goal of making the Jews ‘useful and serviceable to the State [dem Staate nützlicher und brauchbarer zu machen], mainly through better education and enlightenment of its youth and by directing them to the sciences, the arts and the crafts.’ ‘Tolerated Jews’ [tolerirten Juden] would therefore be allowed under certain circum­ stances to send their children to Christian schools; free entry to universi­ ties was confirmed. ‘All kinds of crafts or trades’ could henceforth be learned from Christian masters. The Jewish nation as a whole would be granted ‘a general licence to carry on all kinds of trade’ and its individual members would be free to apply for the right to engage in wholesale trade on the same basis as Christians. ‘Tolerated’ Jews would be entitled to employ as many servants, Jewish or Christian, as they might require. Restrictions on housing would be allowed to lapse. The capitation tax on foreign Jews entering Vienna would be abolished, as were certain other tiresome or demeaning impositions. Jews of a certain commercial stand­ ing would be allowed to carry swords, as would their sons. The rescript concludes, however, with an admonition. Since by these favours We almost [beynahe] place the Jewish nation on an equal level with adherents of other alien religious associations [andern fremden Reli­ gionsverwandten] in respect of trade and enjoyment of civil and domestic facilities, We earnestly advise them to observe scrupulously all political, civil, and judicial laws of the country to which they are bound in the manner incumbent on all other inhabitants?

All this was far removed from the spirit and the letter of the olderJude­ nordnung, But it was not emancipation. The emperor’s rescript specifi­ cally laid down that the right of admission to certain occupations and institutions did not carry with it the right of citizenship and craft master­ ship. From these the Jews ‘remained excluded’ [wovon sie ausgeschlossen bleiben]'. Tucked away in clause fifteen was the requirement that the Jews themselves, in the interests of‘maintaining common confidence [Jur die Aufrechthaltung des gemeinschaftlichen Zutrauens]', cease to employ Hebrew and Yiddish. And while the central idea on which the rescript turned, toleration, signified broadmindedness, its corollary, the distinction repeatedly drawn between the Jews who were to be tolerated and improved and those of their alien and unimprovable brethren, did not. Finally, running through it all, was the patronizing idea of improvement, the notion that what the imperial government in Vienna would now be about was an effort to bring the Jews up to scratch in the light of some never very clearly defined model of ethnic German, but especially Chris­ tian, goodness and civic worth. It was characteristic of the governing spirit in which the enterprise had been approached that a later decree that dealt specifically with the employment of young Jewish people by 3 Pribram, Urkunden, i, No. 205, XVI, 494-500.

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Christian master craftsmen, and was designed to encourage such link­ ages, was frankly entitled Verbesserung derJudenmoral—the ‘Improvement ofJewish Morals’.4 How much of this was cant? Jewry and Judaism in their complexity would continue to be rejected out of hand: not so ruthlessly and mind­ lessly as before, somewhat more thoughtfully, somewhat less irritably, and ostensibly to better purpose. But if the social and cultural features of the Jews continued to puzzle their masters, there was no evidence of any interest in exploring them beyond what was reckoned to be strictly rele­ vant to the good order and prosperity of the empire. The thought that they might be dealing with an authentic, living, unquestionably anom­ alous and tormented, but in the final analysis legitimately discrete social organism with profoundly rooted views, sentiments, and purposes of its own did not much enter the minds or calculations of the officials con­ cerned. It had been settled, on imperial authority, that the Jews needed to be reformed. And that being the case, and things being what they were in the lands of the Habsburgs, plainly they would indeed have to be reformed. But from above. It followed, therefore, once again in quite striking contrast to what had obtained under the older regime, that the general thrust of the new approach was towards the Juture. A later edict issued in 1797 (in the wake of the French Revolution, therefore, rather than in any sense in conscious or unconscious anticipation of it) went so far as to concede explicitly that if all went well the general legal inequal­ ity of the Jews might eventually be entirely abolished—in Bohemia at any rate, not, so far as anyone could see, elsewhere. Even so, it was clear that if that were to happen it would be in consequence, first and foremost, of what the Jews themselves had made of the great new effort to bring them into line with the rest of the emperor’s subjects.

II

The imperial Austrian approach embodied a distinct effort to accommo­ date the teachings of the Enlightenment to an unwavering insistence on absolutist government. In one form or another, wittingly or otherwise, its example would be followed throughout central and eastern Europe, with, as we shall see, far-reaching consequences for much the greater part ofJewry. Crucially, however, in determining the way in which European Jewry as a whole evolved, matters were otherwise in western Europe. The methods and principles by which Great Britain, France, and the Low Countries were governed brought about, in the course of time, changes

4 Decree of 4 Apr. 1786, ibid., No. 239, 575-6.

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in the condition and outlook of the Jewish inhabitants of those countries of a kind that were unprecedented in themselves and would long be unknown in any of the lands that lay east of the Rhine. The salient characteristic of the British approach to the matter of the Jews was that there was little or no interest in reform. The drive towards social control, social uniformity, and meticulous social regulation that was so prominent on the continent was absent in Britain as much in soci­ ety as in government. There were, however, other roots to what might be thought of as British idiosyncrasy in this respect. It was in Great Britain, curiously, that the ‘Jewish Question’ had first been seriously posed and to some extent debated in a major European state in modern times. When Cromwell resolved to rescind King Edward Is edict of expulsion of 1290 in the interests of allowing London’s very small colony of crypto-Jews to surface and permit other Jews, mostly from Holland, to join them, he did so primarily because he had his eye on the advantages Spanish and Portuguese Jews with their worldwide connections might bring to English commerce, the information on foreign affairs with which they could supply him, and the political services they could perform for him on the continent. What is of greatest interest, because, unwittingly, it set a pattern of sorts, was that Cromwell had begun by considering a more open and comprehensive policy than the one that his administration was eventually to implement. When it became apparent, however, that by formally revoking the thirteenth-century edict of expulsion a noisy and troublesome opposition would be aroused, the plan was abandoned.5 The resettlement of Jews in England was allowed to take place, but on a defacto basis and Edward Is edict left to pass into history. A century later there would be a new attempt to settle the matter of the status, rights, and privileges of Jews in England by formal legislation, and so, presumably, once and for all. This was the Jewish Naturalization Bill, or ‘Jew Bill’ so-called, introduced by the Pelham ministry and passed into law by Parliament in 1753. It was not a radical measure. It provided for little more than specific procedures whereby foreign-born Jews might be naturalized and so allowed to acquire rights already possessed by their own native-born children under the principle ofjus soli. Nevertheless, it failed. The implications of the bill were correctly understood to be wider and the lesson that Oliver Cromwell had had to learn was rehearsed by the government of the day. To the opposition’s charge that ‘Nothing could be more absurd in its Nature, or more contrary to the Maxims of our own Policy, than to allow the natural Enemies of the Christian

5 Lucien Wolf, ‘Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers’, Essays in Jewish History (London, 1934), 93-114. Cf. D. S. Katz, Philosemitism and the Readmission of the Jews into England 1603-1655 (Oxford, 1982), passim; and Avrom Saltman, The Jewish Question in 1655: Studies in Prynne’s Demurrer (Ramat-Gan, 1995).

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Religion to be the natural subjects of the Christian State’,6 the govern­ ment was incapable of formulating an effective answer—for all that the authorized spokesmen for Christian England, the senior bishops of the Anglican Church, viewed the matter with indulgence. Their position was that the Church, having the interests of the state at heart, had no reason to object to a limited measure of toleration. It was at the popular level that opposition to the measure was strong. Still, the government took the accusations of impiety heaped against it to heart and a mere seven months after its original passage through Parliament had the act repealed, reinforcing the Cromwellian precedent. From that time on British governments, when called upon to take any position at all, were content to sanction (or ignore) piecemeal lifting of what had been, as in all other European states, an entire series of restric­ tions or prohibitions on the entry and presence ofJews into the country, on the occupations they might engage in, on the public bodies they might join, on the role they might play in public affairs, and, not least, their freedom to form and maintain an organized community, to wor­ ship, to marry, to care for their own, and to bury their dead. It was a slow and irregular process, mostly rather offhand. Where specific restrictions on personal freedom and on communal activity had not explicitly been lifted they were allowed to fall into desuetude by default. Perhaps, as a procedure, it was no more than was to be expected of an increasingly commercial nation, the more so as the tendency had grown, somewhat in the manner that it had long since taken root in the Low Countries, to regard the Jews as allies in Britain’s economic enterprise. By the early years of the eighteenth century, political interest in the Jews of the kind that had initially drawn the Cromwellian government to favour them had largely faded. But English conventional wisdom was firm in holding them to be of worldwide commercial significance. They are, indeed, so disseminated through all the trading Parts of the World, [wrote Addison in 1712] that they are become the Instruments by which the most dis­ tant Nations converse with one another, and by which Mankind are knit together in general Correspondence. They are like the Pegs and Nails in a great Building, which, though they are but little valued in themselves, are absolutely necessary to keep the whole Frame together.7

By the end of the eighteenth century the Jews of England had little to complain of. Those who had been born in Great Britain became British subjects as a matter of course. The grant of civil and commercial liberties to individual Jews, native or foreign-born, met with few difficulties. Jews 6 An Answer to a Pamphlet, entitled, Considerations on the Bill to permit persons professing theJewish Religion to be naturalized (London, 1753), 11. Cited in A. E. Vital, ‘The Jew Bill of 1753 and English National Consciousness’ (New Haven, 1986, unpub.), 11. 7 Spectator, 27 Sept. 1712.

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continued to be excluded from the Guilds of the City of London for a considerable period. But it was not long before they were admitted as brokers in the Royal Exchange. Whether ancient legislation prohibiting ownership of land by Jews retained its force was unclear technically, but in practice no obstacle to freehold possession was raised. The oaths that certain elected and appointed officials, and which junior and senior members of the universities were obliged to take, operated against Jews, although they had been formulated with the exclusion of Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters rather than Jews in mind. The phrase ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ automatically prevented any Jew at all, observant or otherwise, from taking them. But the ancient, and for the Jews themselves vastly more sensitive, issue of the legal force and validity of an oath taken by a Jew in court—when serving as a witness, for ex­ ample—had effectively been disposed of as early as 1667; and the swear­ ing ofJews on the Old Testament as matter of routine was confirmed in a formal judgment in 1744 when Lord ChiefJustice Willes held that to deny the swearing (and therefore the evidence) of a witness who was not a Christian, but did acknowledge a Supreme Being, was ‘contrary not only to the scripture but to common sense and common humanity’. It was ‘a most impolitic notion,’ said the judge, ‘and would at once destroy all that trade and commerce from which this nation reaps such great benefits’. Besides, ‘It is a little mean, narrow notion to suppose that no one but a Christian can be an honest man’.8 The matter of the swearingin ofjewish trial witnesses, and the associated question of the validity of whatever evidence they gave, took very much longer to settle on the continent of Europe, even in post-revolutionary France, as we shall see.9 While generally humane, this ad hoc approach to the matter of the Jews and their emancipation was unquestionably untidy. This had something to do with the Jewish community in Great Britain being a very small one at least until the final decades of the nineteenth century. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century it numbered no more than 30-40,000 members of all ages and conditions throughout the British Isles. More­ over, virtually all were city-dwellers and of these most (some 25,000) lived in the single, but already immense city of London. England’s Jews were therefore sufficiently inconspicuous for such anti-Jewish militants as there were in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London to be unable to make much of a meal of their presence there. And the fact that British Jews were concentrated in London (and Bristol and a few other cities) and therefore almost entirely unknown in the countryside— 8 In Omichund v. Barker, 23 Feb. 1744, Cases argued and determined in the Court of Com­ mon Pleas. Reports of ChiefJustice Willes, 1737-60, ed. C. Dumford, 538-54. Cited in M> C. N. Salbstein, The Emancipation of theJews in Britain: The Question of the Admission of theJews to Parliament (East Brunswick, 1982), 46-7. 9 See below, pp. 231-2.

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except, and then very marginally, as pedlars travelling through it—was a further, unintended contribution to their presence in the country being seen, at any rate at the time, as raising issues of no great urgency or pub­ lic importance. In this respect, as in so many others, their situation was therefore strikingly unlike that of most Jews on the continent of Europe, still overwhelmingly a rural people. British Jews had the further advan­ tage of being totally free of the primal curse of being ground between lord and peasant as in eastern Europe, especially Poland. They were not engaged in moneylending to anything like the same extent as were the Jews of eastern France. The economic roles for which they were best known were stock-jobbing and wholesale and foreign commerce— spheres which were favoured by the government in London—and trades and crafts of the middle-lower rank: silversmithery, shopkeeping, dia­ mond polishing, tailoring, watchmaking, and the like. Those who could not set up shop on their own account engaged in peddling and trading in old clothes as did many Jews in Germany, but among these the driving tendency to escape from the lower levels of the economy was evident and likely to be approved of. That United Kingdom citizenship was deter­ mined primarily by jus soli was another boon; and those who had not been born on British soil found that it could be granted them quite freely by a process of naturalization. Possessed of citizenship, provided they met the appropriate property qualifications, they were entitled to vote in local and parliamentary elections and serve as magistrates and city alder men. Admission to Oxford and Cambridge was barred to them, but so it was to Dissenters and Catholics. In sum, as would be repeatedly and correctly claimed in the course of the sole great formal and politically binding pub­ lic debate on the integration of the Jews into the body politic of England to be held in the nineteenth century, there were virtually no hurdles left for them to overcome apart from that which occasioned that debate: the admission of Jews to membership of parliament itself.10 In the light of the experience elsewhere in Europe it remains an odd­ ity that a century would pass between the fiasco of the Jew Bill’ and the next full-dress public and parliamentary debate on the matter of the Jews in England and that, in the interim, virtually all the questions that had troubled the political classes respecting the Jews were resolved. This had much to do, no doubt, with the fact that the norms of British politics and administration both encouraged and facilitated an incremental and ameliorative treatment of any issue in which ideology and interest were intermixed. But the generally mild approach to the renewed presence of Jews in England and to the question of their legal status in it—a mildness that was only sporadically distinguishable from lack of concern—is perhaps better accounted for by factors of another category altogether. The 10 On the parliamentary debate of 1847, see below, pp. 177-80.

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English had long experience of the presence among themselves of mem­ bers of other nations and religious denominations. The Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh were considered by the English, as they were, of course, by themselves, to possess a separate and distinctive nationality. But ‘nation­ ality’ in the context of the British Isles had long had something less than the usual ring. The Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh were not in the ordinary sense ofthe term, ifin any sense at all,foreign. Religion, to be sure, was another matter. But where religion was at issue, and where it related to the Jews, and to their emancipation in particular, the questions it raised tended to be assimilated into, or, more commonly still, to fall into line behind, the much more immediate, politically weightier questions of the political rights and liberties to be accorded (or denied) to Protestant Dis­ senters, to Unitarians, and, above all, to Roman Catholics. Elsewhere in Europe the terms and significance in which matters of religion and nationality were perceived were of another order, and this was most dra­ matically so in France. And there were other ways in which France and Britain were not at one in these respects and in which the differences between revolutionary France and the absolutist regimes to the east were subtle rather than decisive.

Ill A double note, benevolent and severe, charitable and demanding (but ominous too, as we, with hindsight, are in a position to detect), was sounded in the first and very remarkable debate on the subject in the French National Assembly on 23 December 1789—relatively early therefore in the life of the country’s new revolutionary parliament.11 There had been a few earlier calls for a fresh look at the matter of the Jews. Just prior to the Revolution, when in the wake of the edict of toleration issued in the Protestants’ favour the question whether it might or might not be extended to the Jews first arose, the royal minister Chrétien de Malesherbes was instructed by the Conseil d’État to look into it. At a less exalted level, when in 1777 two Jewish merchants of Metz asked per­ mission to trade in Thionville (a bare 25 kilometres away), and were turned down on the grounds that they were only allowed to settle and operate in ‘authorized locations’, their case was taken up by the distin­ guished jurist Pierre Louis de Lacretelle. Lacretelle spoke in court of the need to ‘soften’ (adoucir) the condition of the Jews. They deserved better of the French. ‘Their ways are simple and religious; an impoverished people, living secluded lives, they often find in close family union the 1 ‘ Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, premières séries (1787-1799) (Paris, 1878; repr. Lichtenstein, 1969), x. 752-60.

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happiness that their political condition seemingly denies them?12 He lost his case and there was no follow-up to his ideas before 1789, any more than there had been to those of Malesherbes—not, at all events, in the decisive realm of government and administration. The debate in the National Assembly was, of course, of an entirely dif­ ferent order in that it took place as a preliminary to a sovereign decision. The immediate issue before the Assembly was the admission of certain semi-pariah classes—among them actors and public executioners—to what came to be termed ‘active citizenship’. It was soon apparent, how­ ever, that the issues presented by the Jews were very different. It was apparent, too, that it would make no better sense to examine the Jews’ case in tandem with that of the Protestants. The latter, like the Jews, were non-Catholics, but their national identity was not in doubt, nor, there­ fore, their right to the new liberties being decreed for all. Whatever else they were, they were Frenchmen. No one in the National Assembly thought otherwise. But were the Jews Frenchmen? If they were not, could they become citizens? The contention of the lead speaker in the debate, Count Stanislaw de Clermont-Tonnerre, was that the argument for granting them full rights of citizenship needed to be founded on the most general principles. Religion was a private affair. The law of the state need not and ought not to impinge upon it. So long as religious obliga­ tions were compatible with the law of the state and contravened it in no particular it was wrong to deprive a person, whose conscience required him to assume such religious obligations, of those rights which it was the duty of all citizen qua citizens to assume. One either imposed a national religion by main force, so erasing the relevant clause of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to which all now subscribed. Or else one allowed everyone the freedom to profess the religious opinion of his choice. Mere tolerance was unacceptable. ‘The system of tolerance, coupled [as it is invariably] to degrading distinctions, is so vicious in itself, that he who is compelled to tolerate remains as dissatisfied with the law as is he whom it has granted no more than such a form of tolerance.’ There was no middle way. The enemies of the Jews attacked them, and attacked him, Clermont-Tonnerre, on the grounds that they were defi­ cient morally. It was also held of the Jews that they were unsociable, that their laws prescribed usury, that they were forbidden to mix with the French by marriage or at table or join them in defence of the country or in any other common enterprise. But these reproaches were either unjust or specious. Usury was blameworthy beyond a doubt, but it was the laws of France that had compelled the Jews to practise it. And so with most of 12 P. L. de Lacretelle, ‘Mémoire pour deux Juifs de Metz’, Œuvres, i (Paris, 1823), 213-35. I am grateful to Professor Sara Maza for calling my attention to the episode and providing me with the source.

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the other charges. Once the Jews had title to land and a country of their own the practice of usury would cease. So would the unsociability that was held against them. So would much of their religious eccentricity [ces travers religieux]. As for the further argument, that they had judges and laws of their own, why so they did, and on this matter he, ClermontTonnerre, would say to his critics (coming to the passage in his address to the Assembly that would be quoted over and over again in the course of the two centuries that followed), that that indeed was impermissible. As a nation the Jews must be denied everything, as individuals they must be granted everything; their judges can no longer be recognized; their recourse must be to our own exclusively; legal protection for the doubtful laws by which Jewish corporate existence is maintained must end; they cannot be allowed to create a political body or a separate order within the state; it is necessary that they be citizens individually.

There remained the question, what if, as some argued, it was the case that the Jews themselves had no interest in citizenship? Why in that case, he went on, ‘if they do not want it, let them say so, in which case expel them [s’ils veulent ne l’être pas, qu’ils le disent, et alors, qu’on les bannisse]’. The idea of a society of non-citizens within the state and a nation within a nation was repugnant to him.13 But in fact, the speaker concluded, that was not at all what the Jews wanted. The evidence was to the contrary. They wished to be incorporated into the nation of France. Clermont-Tonnerre was promptly contradicted on this last, vital point by the abbé Maùry. The term Jew, said the abbé did not denote a religious sect, but a nation, one which had laws which it had always followed and by which it wished to continue to abide. ‘To proclaim the Jews citizens would be as if to say that, without letters of naturalization and without ceasing to be English or Danish, Englishmen and Danes could become Frenchmen? But Maury s chief argument was of a moral and social order. The Jews were inherently undesirable, socially as well as economically. They had been chased out of France, and then recalled, no less than seven times—chased out by avarice, as Voltaire had rightly put it, readmitted by avarice once more, but in foolishness as well. The Jews have passed seventeen centuries without mingling with the other nations. They have never engaged in anything but trade in money; they have been the plague of the agricultural provinces; not one of them has ever dignified [sw ennoblir] his hands by driving a plough. Their laws leave them no time for agriculture; the Sabbath apart, they celebrate fifty-six more festivals than the Christians in each year. In Poland they possess an entire province. Well, then! while the sweat of Christian slaves waters the furrows in which the Jews’ opulence germinates they themselves, as their fields are cultivated, engage in 13 Archives parlementaires, x. 755-6.

PROPOSALS

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weighing their ducats and calculating how much they can shave off the coinage without exposing themselves to legal penalties.

They had never been labourers, Maury continued, not even under David and Solomon. And even then they were notorious for their lazi­ ness. Their sole concern was commerce. Would you make soldiers of them, the abbé asked. If you did, you would derive small benefit from them: they have a horror of celibacy and they marry young. He knew of no general who would wish to command an army of Jews either on the Sabbath—a day on which they never gave battle—or indeed at any other time. Or did the Assembly imagine that they could make craftsmen of them when their many festivals and sabbath days presented an insur­ mountable obstacle to such an enterprise. The Jews held 12 million mortgages in Alsace alone, he informed his colleagues. Within a month of their being granted citizenship they would own half the province out­ right. In ten years’ time they would have ‘conquered’ all of it, reducing it to nothing more than a Jewish colony—upon which the hatred the people of Alsace already bore for the Jews would explode. It was not that he, Maury, wished the Jews to be persecuted. ‘They are men, they are our brothers; anathema on whoever speaks of intolerance!* Nor need their religious opinions disturb anyone. He joined all others in agreeing that they were to be protected. But that did not mean that they could be citizens. It was as individuals that they were entided to protec­ tion, not as Frenchmen.14 Robespierre took the opposite line, supporting Clermont-Tonnerre. All who fulfilled the generally applicable conditions of eligibility to citizenship were entided to the rights that derived from it, he argued, including the right to hold public office. And so far as the facts were concerned, much of what Maury had said about the Jews was ‘infinitely exaggerated’ and contrary to known history. Moreover, to charge the Jews themselves with responsibility for their own persecution at the hands of others, was absurd. Vices are imputed to them.... But to whom should these vices be imputed if not to ourselves for our injustice? . . . Let us restore them to happiness, to country [patrie], and to virtue by restoring them to the dignity of men and citizens; let us reflect that it can never be politic, whatever anyone might say, to condemn a multitude of men who live among us to degradation and oppression.'5

Mgr. de Lafarre, bishop of Nancy, rallied to his clerical colleague Maury. He claimed, not implausibly, that, as bishop of Nancy, he knew the real situation in the eastern provinces of France at first hand. He repeated—albeit in somewhat more generous terms—the abbé Maury’s strictures on the Jews and his characterization of them as members of a separate and distinct nation. And he introduced an element of his own Ibid. 756-7.

15 Ibid. 757.

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INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

into the debate. He had, it was true, been delegated by his constituency to plead against the motion that lay before the Assembly. But it needed to be said that it was plain to him that it was equally in the Jews’ own inter­ ests that it be defeated. For if the motion were passed, if the Jews were released from the constraints under which they had functioned socially and economically virtually from time immemorial, they themselves would be the first to suffer: The people hate them; they are frequent victims ofpopular movements in Alsace. Four months ago there was an attempt to pillage their homes. I travelled to where the rebellion was taking place. I asked what the complaints were. Some claimed that the Jews had monopolized the wheat trade; others that they had gone too far, that they had bought the finest houses, that they would soon possess the entire city. One of the rioters added: ‘Yes, sir, if it ever came to our losing you we should see a Jew as our bishop—they are capable of taking over everything.’ A decree granting the Jews the rights of citizenship would ignite a conflagration.16

The issue thus defined, the National Assembly was asked to choose between two courses, the central distinction between them having as much to do with the general logic by which public business had now to be conducted as with the Jews themselves. One was the application to the specific matter of the Jews of the universal, first (and therefore necessar­ ily unprovable) principles that the new leaders of French society were now all assumed to be agreed upon. The other was an insistence on a hard (and, as it happened, generally uncharitable and in some respects false or misleading17) look at the real, particular, and peculiar case the Jews actu­ ally presented French society and government—and by implication soci­ ety and government elsewhere as well. The dilemma was a real one. Its reach and implications extended beyond the immediate issue under debate. When the motion was put to a formal vote the Assembly proved to be almost equally divided. All that could immediately be agreed upon was postponement. And when the matter was taken up once more a month later—with remarkable dispatch, therefore, considering the doubts and hesitation, not to say ill will, that had rapidly clouded the entire question—the results were still equivocal. On this second occa­ sion, the motion to decree emancipation was put before the Assembly by Talleyrand, still a bishop (of Autun), but otherwise with little in common with the bishop of Nancy. Talleyrand limited his argument, however, to the special cases of the so-called Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux and the small Jewish communities of the Avignonnais and the Comtat Venaissin. Unlike the much more numerous Jews of Alsace, the Jews of Bordeaux had explicidy asked to be granted frill citizenship. They were long setded 16 Archives parlementaires, 758. 17 Typically, the number of festivals and fast days ascribed to the Jews was inflated by a factor of three or four (there being marginally different criteria for calculating them).

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in France. They had the advantage that, historically and legally, as well as socially, they could be presented as being in a category of their own—a very different one, by implication, from that in which the Jews of Alsace had been said, on the whole with good reason, to fall.18 They were substantially acculturated. They had long been free to possess all forms of property. They were already on an equal footing with all other French­ men so far as taxes, participation in local government, service in the mili­ tia, and other such civic duties were concerned; and they performed all relevant functions regardless of the day of the week on which their duties might fall. And finally, it was claimed on their behalf by Talleyrand (in­ accurately) that they had no laws or tribunals of their own. In brief, and having regard to long-standing custom and past formal legislation and ordinances, What they ask, gendemen, is not to be granted the rights of citizens, but rather to be confirmed in their enjoyment of those rights. Their demand has seemed to us to be a perfecdy just one. You have in no way wanted—nor could you have done—to deprive a person of the honourable quality of citizen short of his hav­ ing lost his right to it in the eyes of the nation; and it is evident that not to recog­ nize the Jews of Bordeauxes right to citizenship] at this juncture would be to deprive them of it.’9

The debate that followed was an angry and noisy one on this occasion. It revolved chiefly around the question whether the case of the ‘Por­ tuguese’, ‘Spanish’, and Avignonnais Jews could in fact be treated separ­ ately from that of the ‘German’, i.e. Alsatian, Jews. The abbé Maury argued that a decree in favour of the former, formulated in the terms pro­ posed by Talleyrand and his committee, would be ‘eternal’. A precedent would have been established and when similar arguments in favour of the Jews of Alsace were submitted, as was bound to be the case, it would prove irresistible. Others argued that the two cases were wholly distinct. The Jews ofBordeaux had asked for no more than a reaffirmation of their present status. The case of the Alsatian Jews had to do with the grant of rights which they did not as yet possess. A roll-call vote was taken. Tal­ leyrand’s motion passed by a substantial majority (374 to 224).20 The relatively uncontroversial matter of the small communities in south-west France and the still smaller ones in the Avignonnais and the Comtat Venaissin having been settled, the larger, unquestionably more complex and far-reaching one of the Jews ofAlsace and Lorraine was then set aside 18 Exceptionally, under the anden régime, a few wealthy Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, among them Cerf-Berr, purveyor and contractor to the king, had been granted lettres de naturalisation which allowed them to live and trade and purchase land anywhere in France. This had placed them on a footing that approximated to that ofthe Bordeaux Jews or even improved upon it. 19 28 Jan. 1790, Archives parlementaires, xi. 364. 20 Ibid. 365.

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once more. Clearly, the Assembly had wearied of the subject. Besides, it had much other business to deal with. To the proposal by the duke de Liancourt some weeks later that it be taken up once more, another deputy, a M. Target replied, that The question concerning the Jews is doubtless very important, but we have other, more important ones to deal with. Whatever it is we decide in respect of the Jews will be of concern to very few; to set the terms under which the judicial power is to operate, to set the size and quality of the French army, and to estab­ lish how the finances are to be regulated—these, evidently, are three matters which concern the entire kingdom and which require all your attention. I demand the adjournment of the question of the Jews.21

However, when the question of the Jews inhabiting the eastern provinces was brought before the Assembly a little less than two years later, on 28 September 1791, it was dealt with very quickly. All special decrees and ‘privileges’ relating specifically to Jews were rescinded. The right of all Jews who had taken the ‘civic oath’ to full French citizenship as provided by the Constitution was affirmed. Those who had main­ tained their opposition to the reform, and continued to warn of trouble ahead in Alsace if it were passed,22 were to be molified, to be sure, by a thorough survey of indebtedness to Jews in the Departments of Haut and Bas-Rhin being conducted and the means to liquidate it being sought for.23 But for the rest, the reformers* a priori argument had proved to be compelling. The offer of citizenship to all the Jews of France was to be made in the shape of à reform based on abstract principles and applied as a matter of universal propriety and justice, but not justice long denied to the Jews specifically nor any other special consideration that might be their due. The standpoint of the revolutionaries in Paris both on ques­ tions relating to the largish community ofJews in Alsace and on those relating to the much smaller communities elsewhere in France was that if these matters merited treatment it was only in terms dictated by an agreed conception of how society as a whole needed to be organized and gov­ erned. It is noteworthy, too, that none of those who had argued on the Jews’ behalf had troubled to deny the allegations of faults and misbehav­ iour levelled at them. Such speakers had confined themselves to offering excuses and to advancing the claim that a new deal for the Jews was 21 26 Feb. 1790, Archives parlementaires, xi. 710. 22 Prince Victor de Broglie spoke ominously ofthe danger of ‘mauvais effets en Alsace’ (ibid. 441); and not unreasonably so. News of the taking of the Bastille had been greeted in Alsace with an extensive pogrom perpetrated by peasants. It was put down by troops in short order, but injury to person and property was widespread and many hundreds of Alsatian Jews fled to Basel, Mulhouse, and Dijon. Verbal agitation against the grant of emancipation to the Jews continued steadily thereafter, as did periodic threats of renewed violence. See Zosa Szajkowski, ‘Pera'ot be-alzas be-‘et ha-mahapekhot shel 1789, 1830, vc-1848’, Zion, 20,1-2 (1955), 82-9. 23 Ibid, 21. 441-2.

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precisely what a newly benevolent society needed to do in order to bring this very unsatisfactory, but neither hopelessly nor wholly wicked, people into line with the rest of the population. In this respect, then, the position taken by the masters of the new revolutionary France differed little from that of the masters of legitimist and absolutist Austria. The under­ lying logic and thrust of the offer of emancipation lay in the fact that virtually all—moderates no less than radicals, Dantonists no less than Robespierrists, Christians as well as deists, pantheists, and atheists—held that equality of status in the state they were in their various ways intent on establishing was bound up of necessity with the elimination of all groups, classes, or corporations intermediate (and therefore mediating) between the state itself and the citizen. All social classes and categories, therefore, however they might be defined, whatever their specific nature, and regardless of their purpose, had now to be shorn of such special rights, prerogatives, status, or duties as they had at some point in the past been endowed with. This applied to the aristocracy and to the guilds, as a matter of course. It applied to the established Roman Catholic Church and to non-Catholic religious groups and sects, notably the Protestants. And it applied afortiori to all alien national or ethnic groups whose members had now to decide, therefore, whether they wished to become Frenchmen or to remain foreigners—people whose presence would still be tolerated, quite possibly, but who would have to remain wholly outside the circle of recognized citizenship and political participation. It was an immense departure from all that had gone before in respect of such groups. It was underlined and, so to speak, endorsed, by the choice—somewhat as in Austria—being theirs to make. Indeed, the kinship with Austria and, as we shall see, with the other absolutist regimes went further. The uncertainty about the nature and quality ofJewry and what could or should be done about it, if anything at all, remained unresolved by the decree of emancipation. The Jews, seen as a collective, were evidendy a ‘church’. But the grounds for regarding them as members of an alien nation were almost equally strong. And there was the question, what did the Jews themselves intend? Did all want to be citizens? Did all want to be Frenchmen? Were the Jews prepared, as part of the promised release from their long-standing disabilities, to give up what was seen by all, by the Jews themselves as well as by non-Jews, as their ancient propensity to isolation, to social organization in self-contained communities, to the setding of their affairs and disputes among themselves and by themselves, and to marrying exclusively within the community and the faith? It was evident that what might be true of the Jews of Bordeaux and Paris was unlikely to be true, at any rate not equally true, of the Jews of Metz or Altkirch. Rep­ resentations to the Assembly on the part of the former spoke, effectively, of a desire for incorporation into the body politic of France, the single reservation being continued personal loyalty to the ancient religion.

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Representations submitted on behalf of the Jews of Lorraine and Alsace, always more timid in language and approach, emphasized the need and wish to retain a firm communal structure in all circumstances. The logic that had moved the French revolutionaries to resolve on an emancipation of the Jews posed, not solved, the question of their con­ tinued identity as a distinct people; and its urgency was reinforced by the circumstance that the idea of the Nation lay at the very foundation of the revolutionaries’ own political and social outlook. Ifthe sovereign, unitary Nation was to replace the king under God as the fundamental social and political entity and it was to be in its terms that the highest public good would be determined henceforth and all legitimate authority derived, it followed that there could be no room for other, distinct, separable peoples with distinct and separate rules of behaviour—not, that is, within a single nation-state, least of all within their own French Republic. There could certainly be no room at all in France for closed groups that posi­ tively rejoiced in their social and to some extent economic, perhaps even political, isolation, but certainly in their own mental and cultural particu­ larity. It was conceivable that such groups might be tolerated as strangers. It was inconceivable that they be admitted to full membership in society and to regular membership in the Republic as free and equal citizens. It followed, in practice, that what the revolutionaries were calling for was not only equality of official treatment of the individual by the state and its institutions, but a high degree of uniformity within the citizenry itself as well. France was no longer to be an untidy complex of estates, guilds, classes, and corporations, all quite loosely supervised from above, if at all, none totally devoid of autonomy and the capacity to go its own way. There was now to be a strictly defined, sovereign, central, secular author­ ity fit to represent all and to govern all without encountering entrenched or inalienable or special and peculiar prerogatives of any kind—a central authority that was therefore capable of assuming virtually untrammelled power. To the question whether this was a system in which room for Jewry as traditionally constituted could be found, the answer, manifestly, was: no. Thus in theory; but thus in practice too, as would soon be apparent in Alsace and to some extent in Lorraine as well, these being the only provinces in France in which Jews formed more than a negligible fraction of the population and in which, by no means coincidentally, as we have seen, Jews were commonly thought of as presenting a socio­ economic problem that required especially firm action.

Alsace and Lorraine, acquired by France under the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, contained the westernmost segment of Ashkenazi, Yiddish-speaking Jewry. On the eve of the Revolution the some 20,000 Jews of Alsace whose economic role, social characteristics, and sheer presence in the province were at the centre of the debate accounted for

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approximately half the entire Jewish population of France. (In Paris at the time there were less than a thousand souls all told.) Like their brethren in the Germanies, the Alsatian Jews inhabited small towns and villages, partly because they were explicitly prohibited from taking up residence in the cities of Strasbourg, Colmar, and Mulhouse, although visits for commer­ cial purposes by daytime were tolerated. Four-fifths of the lesser localities in the province were similarly (although unlike the cities, not necessarily) without Jewish residents. In the 183 communes which Jews did inhabit, they typically constituted a minority of 5-10 per cent; in some (about a score) they accounted for 15-25 per cent. All told, they formed just under 3 per cent of Alsace’s total population of 684,000. Nevertheless, and characteristically of the terms in which their affairs were almost invariably viewed, the authorities in the period immediately prior to the Revolution had been much worried lest they be multiplying too rapidly. To an inquiry by de la Galazière, the Intendant of the province, one bailli reported ‘a nation that propagated as hurriedly as rabbits’ [la propagation hâtive de cette nation rivale des lapins]' and another that in the course of time the Christian population of the province would be reduced to a minority. It had been laid down by letters patent in 1784, therefore, that Jews might not marry without royal authorization. In fact, there had been no basis for such panic in high places. Jewish girls did tend to marry somewhat earlier than was the norm in France and the records of eleven localities in Alsace did show that there were 2.96 children in the average Jewish family compared with 2.6 children in the average Christian family. But it needs to be recalled in this connection that celibacy was much rarer among Jews of both sexes than among Christians, there being no priests, monks, nuns, or longserving soldiers among them and even Jewish domestic servants, unlike many Christian servants, tending to be married. But in any event, the enduring complaints against the Jews, over and above the fundamental objection to their actual presence in the province, had to do with their occupations. These, principally, were peddling and dealing in second-hand clothing and merchandise apart from the more fortunate and successful among them who were dealers in grain, cattle, and horses—a circumstance that had opened the road to their serving as purveyors to the king’s armies, as we have seen. And there was moneylending. It was mostly on a petty scale and, contrary to the common sup­ position, it was a trade in which it was very far from easy to build up a fortune no matter how assiduously one went about it. It was, besides, a difficult, risky, and, of course, exceedingly unpopular business. Debt col­ lection was invariably hard and doubtful and rendered especially difficult by the prohibition on Jews’ owning land, the consequence of which was that land acquired upon default of a loan had to be sold within a year.24 24 Paula E. Hyman, The Emancipation of theJews ofAlsace (New Haven, 1991), 11—29;

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That numbers of local Jews were engaged in this always and inevitably bitter, not to say nasty and dangerous, business of extending financial credit was not in dispute. There was no disputing either, that on the eve of the Revolution one-third of all mortgages in the province were in the hands ofJews, nor, of course, that the credit they extended was against interest, thus exposing them to the charge thought to be peculiarly appEcable to them: usury. The roots of usury as a Jewish occupation and as a charge to be levelled against them are traceable to medieval Christendom’s insistent repression and humiliation of the Jews. Forced out of virtually all socially acceptable occupations, they were thereupon damned and despised for taking up what was left to them: peddling, dealing in second-hand clothing, pawnbroking, and the making of straightforward money loans against interest. All these retained their negative emotive force for many centuries and go part of the way to explain the continuing hostility towards Jews—either on the ground, as in Alsace, or in the abstract, as in Paris, well after the new norms set by the Revolution had sunk in. For then, remarkably, where the Jews were concerned, the otherwise strict and insistent athe­ ism—or at best, deism—of the republicans can be seen to have been admixed with a good many of what had always been distinctly Christian, especially Roman Catholic, dislikes, prejudices, and pieces of mischie­ vously inculcated ignorance. A demand issued by the authorities in Nancy on the 23 of Brumaire of the Year Two of the new revolutionary calendar (13 November 1793), calling on ‘philosophers of the former Jewish religion’ to hasten and intensify the process of accommodation to the new regime, required them to hand over ‘their mystical charters as well as ... all objects of gold or silver, furniture, ornaments, [and other artefacts and] emblems serving a ritual purpose’.25 On the first of Frimaire (21 November) of the same year the district procurator took up the matter for himself to denounce the Jews of Lorraine for their contin­ ued religiosity. They had, he declared, continued wickedly to observe the Sabbath, engage in the ritual slaughter of animals, wear distinctive cloth­ ing, and, worst of all, circumcise their infant sons. Notionally and chronologically this form of denigration accorded with the movement to ‘de-Christianize’ France and the systematic desecration and destruction of Christian icons, the abdication of the archbishop of Paris, the renam­ ing of Notre Dame, and other such actions. Still, the procurator’s lan­ guage is revealing: It is the inhumane law of these people that the new-born male infant is to be bloodily operated upon as if nature herself were imperfect. They wear long Rina Neher-Bemheim, Documents inédits sur l’entrée des Juifs dans la société française (1750-1850), i (Tel-Aviv, 1977), 61-5,75-8.

2S Cited in Robert Anchel, Napoléon et lesJuifs (Paris, 1928), 16.

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beards with ostentation, mimicing the patriarchs whose virtues they themselves have failed to inherit. They employ a language of which they are ignorant and which has long since fallen into disuse. In consequence, I do require of the pro­ visional commission that it forbid them such practices and arrange for an auto da fé [sic] to Truth of all Hebrew books and of the Talmud most especially, the author of which was so mischievous as to permit them to make usurious loans to men who are not of their faith.26

In fact, numbers ofJews had gone far to accommodate themselves to the new regime. Torah scrolls had been put away, synagogues closed, rit­ ual candelabra handed over to municipal authorities, beards shaven off, dress revised. Some of this was voluntary; some of it was in the nature of passive surrender to a new gzeira. And if there was still much disquiet and silent resistance to the effort to secularize and in effect dissolve Jewry, helped by the fact that in the early, dangerous, and tumultuous years of revolutionary and republican France the matter of the Jews was not one to which great and consistent attention was ever paid, the trend towards acculturation which the new regime had precipitated would continue to gather force. It was only with the rise of Napoleon and the remarkable effort to establish a fresh and coherent social and political order for all of France to which he and his entourage were to devote so much energy that the affairs of the Jews were given something like serious attention overall: serious and systematic, if not substantially different in spirit. The administrators of the Napoleonic Empire saw three difficulties about the Jews. The first was constitutional. Once the revolutionary and ideology-intensive approach to government and politics had at least partly been superseded by Napoleonic opportunism, relations with the Roman Catholic Church and the French Reformed Church could be put on an orderly basis. The new, tidily minded Bonapartist administra­ tors recognized that by the same token the Jews too would have to be dealt with: disputes within the Jewish community that had boiled over and come before them from time to time periodically reminding them of the fact. In one case the authorities found themselves having to contend with a conflict between the rabbi and the elders of an Alsatian commu­ nity on the one hand and a man whom they were determined to expel from their midst on the other. When the excommunicant and his family found themselves denied the traditional communal services ofshohet (rit­ ual slaughterer) and mikva (ritual bath), they lodged an appeal against the judgment with the civil authorities. Such recourse to extra-communal authority ran wholly against the grain of traditional Jewish practice, as we have seen, and by the same token had always been rare. What was rela­ tively new was not so much that it landed the authorities with an issue of which they had had no prior experience, no machinery to deal with, and 26 Ibid. 18.

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no precedents to rely upon, but one for which the criteria by which to decide it were unclear. Whom was the departmental prefect to support: the private citizen with a seemingly legitimate grievance? or the estab­ lished communal leaders through whom a regime that was reluctant to leave any part of the social fabric of the country wholly alone, even so obscure a segment as the Jewish, believed it was best able to effect its con­ trol and impose its wishes? The second difficulty arose from the fact that the makers and legatees of the French Revolution, all in their way children of the Enlightenment, approached the needs and problems of society in fundamentally ahistorical terms. It was on the universal, not the particular, that their minds were set. They tended to see things and to define issues in relatively abstract terms—in terms of models, as we would now say. Reason, not revelation, or faith, or grace, or, least of all, ancient authority was the proper determinant of social questions. If the world was to be built anew—a better, cleaner, neater, above all more rational world, a world from first principles—much ofthe past and its incongruities had necessarily to be sloughed off. Could this, therefore, continue to be a world in which the Jews, always, to many European minds, the most peculiar and, at the same time, most irritating and offensive social category of all, had a place? But however irritated by Jewish particularism and anxious to stamp it out, there was the third, countervailing difficulty facing the Bonapartists that stemmed from the loosely mercantilist principles to which, by and large, they were equally wedded. Believing that increase of population led normally to an increase of national wealth, and that this was as much the case where commerce and industry, as opposed to agriculture, were concerned, they were reluctant to deal with the Jews in the drastic and peremptory manner of their medieval forebears, namely by expulsion or worse. If the Jews contributed to commerce and industry, and generally to the wealth and the civil and military power of the state, it was expedi­ ent, they reasoned, to keep them. If it was found that they did not con­ tribute, or that they contributed insufficiently, might it not be possible to compel them to do a great deal more? Either way, the result of such exploratory reasoning was their recourse to the now ever commoner habit of distinguishing between those Jews who were indeed ‘useful’ to the state and the economy (or thought capable of being so) and those who were not. How ‘usefulness’ was to be defined, how the ‘useful’ were to be identified, and, of course, what was to be done with those who failed the relevant tests were all exceedingly tricky questions to which the Bonapartists had no better answers than anyone else. True, where the injection of these and similar elements of the intellectual and politicotheoretical baggage of the Enlightenment into the administration of the state had been attempted very sparingly and the problem presented by a Jewish presence in civil society was not thought to be so significant or

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serious as to demand drastic and systematic treatment, none of this much mattered. Such was the case, by and large, in eighteenth- and nineteenth­ century England, as we have seen. But where matters were otherwise— as they were, and as they will further be shown to be, in most other parts of Europe—and where those who ruled the Jews sought actively to com­ pose and apply a working distinction between those who were useful to them and worth retaining and those who were not, there the impact on Jewry itself, both structurally and materially, would be significant—and in some respects disastrous. The prosperous members ofJewry, the ‘use­ ful’ ones by most criteria, would tend to grow in prosperity. The indi­ gent, the ‘useless*, and the ‘superfluous’ would tend to lapse into deeper indigence. The line drawn between the privileged and the under­ privileged in Jewry would steadily sharpen and within the various Jewish communities it would be the privileged, increasingly, who called the tune for all. As the impact of the Enlightenment began to wear off in the course of the nineteenth century a reversion to ancient, more brutal, less intellectualized forms of dealing with the Jews would gain in strength. But in all cases it would be the application of ideas born of the Enlight­ enment that paved the way both conceptually and administratively. Something of this can already be detected in the forms in which Napoleon finally took up the matter of the Jews. Napoleon’s basic decree on Jewish affairs of 30 May 1806 began, in traditional, pre-revolutionary style, with a denunciation of‘certain Jews, whose sole occupation is that of usury’. These, by their most ‘immoderate’ insistence on high rates of interest, had reduced a great many French peasants to a ‘condition of great distress’; and the emperor, for his part, was determined to come to the aid of those of his subjects whose circumstances had been so drastic­ ally reduced by the Jews’ ‘unjust avidity’. So far, so familiar. But it was equally urgent, the emperor declared, to go to the root of the matter. It was necessary to seek to revive active ‘sentiments of civic morality’ among the Jews themselves for such sentiments, unfortunately, ‘had slackened [amortis] among far too many of them in consequence of the condition of abasement and humiliation in which they had long lan­ guished*. This too was a condition which he, Napoleon, promised not to tolerate and with these considerations and purposes in mind an Assembly of Jewish Notables would be convoked, its duty being to consider the relevant issues systematically and make specific proposals for the precise basis on which the condition of this people might be subject to cor­ rection and their admittance to civil society allowed.27 The intensely critical and emotive language apart, there was little in 27 ‘Décret impérial portant sursis à l’exécution de jugements rendus en faveur de juifs contre cultivateurs non négociants de plusieurs départements de l’empire’, 30 mai 1806, in A. E. Halphen (ed.), Recueil des lois . . . concernant les Israélites depuis la révolution de 1789 (Paris, 1851), 18-19.

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these last, operative clauses of the decree, or so it could be argued, that was not in the spirit of the age, the more so as the decree was in accord with the underlying thrust of two of the best known and most widely publicized contemporary tracts on the subject. One of these was French, the abbé Grégoire’s celebrated prize submission to a competition held by the Royal Society for Arts and Sciences of Metz (in Lorraine) in 1787. The subject set the competitors had been: ‘Est-il des moyens de rendre les juifs plus heureux et plus utiles en France?’ (‘Are there ways and means of rendering the Jews [both] happier and more useful in France?*). Gré­ goire’s own essay was entitled, equally characteristically: ‘Essai sur la régénération physique, morale, et politique des Juifs’ (‘An essay on the physical, moral, and political regeneration of the Jews’).28 The other tract was German: Christian Wilhelm von Dohm’s ‘Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden’ (‘On the Civic Improvement of the Jews’), begun at the instigation of Moses Mendelssohn,29 published in 1781. Grégoire, who became a prime mover in the campaign to grant the Jews civil rights, had argued that the moral and social failings of the Jews were due to the conditions to which they had been subject and that their polit­ ical emancipation, besides releasing them from subjection, would rid them of their superstitions and of their tendency to separatism as well. Dohm’s argument was on roughly the same lines, except that he, for his part, had a somewhat higher regard for the Jews’ religion and culture than Grégoire and was better informed about both. Dohm placed particular emphasis on the need to couple emancipation with education. But what counted in either case was the two men’s common denominator neatly encapsulated in the key terms in each man’s title: Grégoire’s ‘régénération’ and Dohm’s ‘Verbesserung’. The Jews were an unsatisfactory lot; they needed to be, and fortunately could be, remade and brought up to the mark. Napoleon’s lay Assembly ofJewish Notables, chosen by the govern­ ment itself, mostly on the recommendation of the departmental préfets rather than by the communities themselves, convened in Paris in July 1806. In February of the following year it was followed in turn, as planned, by the somewhat better known, quasi-ecclesiastical, but pre­ sumptuously entitled ‘Sanhedrin’. The Sanhedrin’s function was to pro­ vide a form of rabbinic sanction for the notables’ recommendations. Neither the Assembly nor the Sanhedrin were genuine deliberative bodies, however. The notables were to respond to a series ofprecise ques­ tions formulated and presented to them by Napoleon’s commissioners. 2# Published in its original form in 1789; published in London in English translation two years later. Grégoire, it needs to be added, shared his prize with Adolphe Thièry, a Protestant attorney practising at the parlement of Nancy, and Zalkind Hourwitz, a Polish Jew with original and radical ideas of his own on the entire subject of the condition of his people. On Zalkind Hourvitz see below, pp. 99-102. 29 On Mendelssohn see below, pp. 141-4.

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Their answers, taken together, were to serve as the basis for a lasting definition of the position of the Jews in respect of the questions the emancipation had evoked and, as all could agree, were still largely hang­ ing fire. It was, of course, these questions that shaped the form and content of the proceedings, defined the issues considered, set the very narrow framework in which such discussions as were conducted took place, and largely determined the terms in which first the notables, then the rabbis, were—according to the nature of each topic—either free or under some compulsion to make their case. Was a Jew permitted to take more than one wife? Did the Jewish religion sanction divorce? What precisely was the nature ofrabbinical authority? Was it permissible forJews to intermarry with Christians? Were Frenchmen brethren or strangers inJewish eyes? Did a Jew born in France and treated as a citizen consider France to be his own country, one that he was bound to defend and whose laws he was bound to obey? Did Jewish law distinguish between usurious loans to Jews, presum­ ably forbidden, and usurious loans to others, presumably permitted? Ostensibly requests for authoritative information, all the questions put to the notables by the commissioners touched on the terms on which the Jews would be seen, or proposed to see themselves, as actual or future citizens of France and members of the French nation. Some were simple enough and easily answered, others were embarrassing. The questions about marriage outside the faith and usury—the latter, in plain language, meaning the legitimacy of extending credit to non-Jews against interest— were especially tricky. Jewish Law being clear on both counts (negative in the former case, positive in the latter, as the commissioners seem to have known), the notables could only prevaricate. But it was their response to the questions bearing directly on their loyalty and patriotic sentiment that was most revealing and was to be of most lasting consequence. Men who have adopted a country [they told the commissioners], who have resided in it these many generations—who, even under the restraint of particular laws which abridged their civil rights, were so attached to it that they preferred being debarred from the advantages common to all other citizens rather than leave it—cannot but consider themselves Frenchmen in France; and they con­ sider as equally sacred and honourable the bounden duty of defending their country. . . . Love of country is in the heart ofJews a sentiment so natural, so powerful, and so consonant with their religious opinions, that a French Jew con­ siders himself in England, as among strangers, although he may be among Jews; and the case is the same with English Jews in France. To such a pitch is this senti­ ment carried among them, that during the last war, French Jews were fighting desperately against otherjews, the subjects ofcountries then at war with France.30

There is in all this more than a hint of an overawed and somewhat frightened people’s anxiety to please. Anxiety was no doubt at the root 30 D. Tama (ed.), Transactions of the Parisian Sanhedrin, English trans. F. D. Kirwan (London, 1807), 149-56 [slightly amended].

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too of one of the better known and longest lasting ‘reforms’ associated with the Assembly of Notables, the reclassification of the Jews of France as ‘Israélites’ on the grounds that, over and above the ‘unhappy prejudices’ evoked by the term ‘Jew’, it connotes a nation, not a religion. But the dilemma in which the notables had found themselves was real and harsh enough. They had no precedent before them for dealing with the ques­ tions with which the imperial commissioners had chosen to confront them. They had not been required to apostatize, as Jews had so often been asked or required to do in the past, as the price ofsimple survival, let alone admittance to civil society. They had not even been asked whether they were prepared to do so. The issues they were required to pronounce upon were political and cultural, not religious. What the commissioners most wanted to know was whether they understood the meaning of Jewish nationhood (or peoplehood) to be compatible with effective member­ ship in the French nation? And if it was not, were they then prepared to modify the former to suit the terms and needs ofthe latter? Napoleon and his ministers ended by accepting the declaration of unequivocal national adherence and loyalty offered them at the conclusion of the proceedings as satisfactory. Whether their doubts about the validity of the answers given them were fully removed is less certain. The commissioners’ doubts about the Jews and their hostility to them had been much in evidence throughout these transactions. And, indeed, in the event, the upshot for French Jewry was less clear-cut than the notables and rabbis assembled in Paris seem to have anticipated and a good many among them had hoped for. French Jewry would now be officially treated as a purely religious denomination and incorporated into a typically Napoleonic framework modelled after those established for the governance of other religious bodies. But Napoleon’s decision to follow up the meetings of the Assem­ bly of Notables and the rabbinic Sanhedrin with the institutional and social reorganization of French Jewry was combined, very much at his personal insistence, with a partial, but by no means insignificant, rollingback of the emancipatory process itself. On 17 March 1808 three decrees were promulgated in the emperor’s name and over his signature. Two followed directly from the deliberations and recommendations of the Assembly and the Sanhedrin. These laid down the outline for the new institutions, principally the consistoires, through which Jewish religious and educational services would now be administered and controlled, and the plan to rehabilitate the Jews morally and culturally carried forward. The third decree was of another order. It was explicitly hostile. It hit a large segment of the Jews of France very hard. And it was, indeed, soon to be known—as much for the spirit which informed it as for its content—as the ‘infamous decree’ (décret infante). Its chief stated purpose was to stamp out usury and to relieve the peasants of the eastern provinces of France, Alsace in particular, of their

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indebtedness to Jewish moneylenders and to that end existing debts to Jews were to be heavily and arbitrarily reduced. But the stipulations of the decree went a great deal further. Restrictions were to be levelled on the freedom of Jews to engage in a trade of their choice and to move from one part of the country to another without special permission.31 They were to submit to special commercial registration. They were not to employ the Hebrew language in their commercial transactions. Unlike all other citizens, they were to be forbidden to offer substitutes in case of conscription for military service. And the entry of foreign Jews into France was to be conditional either on military performance or on satis­ faction of specified property qualifications. Unquestionably, the décret infâme bore the stamp of Napoleon’s barely governable personal aversion to the Jews—linked, to be sure, to his determination to stamp out the social and economic plague of usury in which, as was undeniable, great numbers of Jews in eastern France were involved.32 These would now, inexorably, be reduced to bankruptcy and in many cases indigence. And they would be set still further apart from other citizens as a pariah class by the exemption from the stipulations of the decree that were granted the Jews of south-west France and other, specified departments of the country. The distinction drawn between the acceptable, because relatively assimilated, Jews of south-west France and the unacceptable, because manifestly unassimilated, Jews of Alsace and Lorraine was thus formally renewed and reinforced. If it was by no means a complete and definitive reversal of the emancipatory process, it was certainly a flat, albeit implicit denial of the principles on which it had been founded.33 31 Clause 16 of the third decree, Halphen, Recueil des lois, 46. 32 Although substantially less, playing a smaller economic role, than was commonly claimed. It was characteristic of the turn that the image of the Jews in France would take with special force after the Revolution, that it was a charge that the emperor accepted without further question as entirely valid. The notion that Jews played a major role in the business of moneylending and that, as a consequence of bad debts owing to them, vast holdings of land had come, or were likely to come, into their possession, continued to be generally accepted under the Restoration. It has, indeed, been almost as easily accepted by ostensibly disinterested observers, not excluding reputable historians, in retrospect. The facts were otherwise. Examining the registers of mortgages in the five eastern departments of Haut Rhin, Bas Rhin, Moselle, Meuse, and Vosges for the years 1799 to 1850, Zosa Szajkowski found that of 62,000 mortgages for a total value of 105,500,000 francs, only 9,000 (14.5 per cent) for a total value of7,400,000 francs (7 per cent) had Jews as their bene­ ficiaries. A far greater participant in the business of moneylending turned out to be the Church (Szajkowski, ‘Pera'ot be-alzas’, 97). None the less, it was the myth of assiduous Jewish skullduggery, not the ascertainable facts, that then, as always, caught the imagination and carried greatest conviction. Thus in matters that were open to systematic inquiry; thus, doubly so, as we shall see repeatedly, in matters that were not susceptible to proofat all or, most dramatically and fatefully of all, were demonstrably fictitious. Thus in revolu­ tionary and post-revolutionary France; thus throughout the entire European continent. 33 The bitter taste which the decret infame left in Jewish mouths would be sweetened somewhat when, Napoleon’s decree having run the ten-year course specified for it, the

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It was true, of course, that emancipation had come to the Jews of France as a gift. If it was in some sense a victory, it was not one that they had won for themselves. Nor could it have been. The Jews of France were devoid both of the structure of internal leadership and authority and of the political and material resources that would all have been necessary for them to have embarked on such an enterprise either by themselves or with allies. There had been neither the possibility nor any question of agreed collective needs and interests—as opposed to some very limited, uncoordinated lobbying by a handful of well-placed individuals, some acting for the Jews of Bordeaux and their analogues, others for the Jews of the eastern provinces. It was as a function of the philosophical and political ideas on which the French revolutionary state had been founded and to which its true founders, with rare exceptions, held with all their hearts that emancipation had been awarded them, along with permission to apply for membership in society at large. It had everything to do, therefore, both with the dramatic changes that had occurred in France’s governing circumstances and in the climate of opinion in French soci­ ety—to which there needs to be added the revolutionaries’ unbending conviction that it was necessary and proper to apply their chosen social political principles universally. Emancipation so conceived and so promulgated had, that is to say, very little, if anything at all, to do directly with the specific condition, or needs, or history, of the Jews themselves. But the lasting significance of the French revolutionary decree of 1791 lay less in its impact on French Jewry than in its having established an example for government, society, and Jewry itself in the rest of Europe to follow or to reject or to avoid altogether. What none could do from this time on was to ignore it totally: not while French political and military power was at its peak, but not later, either, when it had been radically diminished and the French origins of the idea ofJewish emancipation had largely faded from view. The gift of emancipation beyond the borders of France was never entirely for the French to grant. In the duchy of Warsaw, distant to be sure, but wholly dependent on French goodwill, the Restoration regime refrained from renewing it. So doing, it fell in line, curiously, in this respect at least, with the strict revolutionaries of 1789 and 1791. However, it was not for­ gotten and along with other questions relating to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth­ century French opinion on Judaism and the Jews revolutionary and Napoleonic treatment of the Jews would become a topic of fierce debate among some historians. The classic instance was the ferociously hostile reception accorded Robert Anchel’s meticulous doctoral study (published as Napoléon et les Juifs (Paris, 1928)) by the then senior Marxist specialist on French revolutionary history, Albert Mathiez. Mathiez, who would brook no criticism of his heroes, savaged Anchel both in the course ofAnchel’s viva at the Sorbonne and in a long review article published in Annales historique de la Révolution française: Organe de la société des études Robespierristes, 5, 4 (July-Aug. 1928), 371-83. Anchel’s academie career suffered devastating injury.

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resistance of France’s Polish allies to the prospect of Jewish emancipation was absolute and French acquiescence in their obstruction virtually total, as we shall see. In the Netherlands matters were otherwise, but only to a limited degree for reasons of geographical proximity and the very much tighter incorporation into the Napoleonic system that had been imposed. The real key lay with the Dutch themselves, then and later. The Jewish communities had enjoyed a famous degree of freedom in much (if not all) of the country since early in the seventeenth century. What the patriotic ‘Batavian Republic’ established under French auspices in 1795 would put through was less a dramatic change than a regularization of their status by comprehensive legislation—in much the manner it had settled the more difficult and, for the Dutch, substantially more import­ ant question of the status and rights of the country’s Roman Catholics. The pattern was indeed analogous to the French. In March 1796 the Dutch Reformed Church was disestablished. On 2 September of that year the Batavian National Assembly proclaimed ‘the equality of Jews with all other citizens’, article one of the decree stipulating that ‘No Jew shall be debarred from any rights or privileges that are enshrined in the Batavian Constitution’. Later, under the brief reign of the emperor’s brother, Louis Napoleon, the communal structure of Dutch Jewry was reorganized and a central consistoire established to regulate religious appointments, observance, and teaching. And as in France in 1789, the fundamental plan of emancipation was contested. The Jews, it was argued, saw their true fatherland in their ancestral Palestine. Even in exile they maintained a system of law and governance of their own. While civic rights were in order, political rights were not—unless the Jews themselves explicitly opted for Dutch citizenship rather than it being imposed upon them wholesale and from above. The debate was longer than the one in the French National Assembly. A note was struck that would never have been heard in Paris: to grant the Jews political rights here and now would be to divert them from their true path as they awaited the Messiah. And the nastiness of tone and reference that had so rapidly surfaced in Paris were absent. There was no talk at all of commer­ cial and financial avidity or of endemic involvement in usury. And after the withdrawal of the French all these reforms were allowed to stand without serious questions being raised. Where, however, unlike Holland, the pre-revolutionary and preNapoleonic rules by which the Jews had been governed stood in absolute contrast to the idea ofemancipation, there matters were otherwise. There there would be no question of allowing Jewish emancipation to stand— if indeed it had been granted. The only issue would be whether the old restrictive regime was to be reimposed in its entirety. In Italy, where French rule and influence, while it lasted, had been particularly marked, the determination of rulers to restore the status quo ante, once their

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armies had gone, was unmistakable, although not everywhere of the same intensity. In the States of the Church it was unbending: under the reinstated Pope Pius VII the gates of the Roman ghetto were firmly shut upon its Jewish community once more?4 In Ferrara the ghetto chains were put back; but left unlocked and unused, on display, so to speak, perhaps as some kind of ill-defined warning. In Ancona the chains were not restored at all. It was in Germany, however, in all its geo-political complexity, that matters became most fraught. In the greatest political event of the era, at the Congress of Vienna itself, it had been resolved formally on 8 June 1815 that it was incumbent on the members of the German Confeder­ ation to consider an ‘amelioration* of the civil status of all those who ‘confessed the Jewish faith in Germany*. But, as the architects of the Legitimist Restoration themselves may well have anticipated, the resolu­ tion remained a dead letter. In Frankfurt there would be a concerted effort to force the Jews back into the city’s notorious ghetto. In other German states and cities too, notably in the Hansa towns of Bremen and Lübeck, the right of residence was cut down to approximately the old proportions and fresh expulsions instituted. True, the fact that the Con­ gress should have agreed to formulate a resolution in favour of the Jews— ‘in the Name of the Most Holy and Indivisible Trinity’, it may be added—was in itself a sign that the climate of the times was not, after all, as before. And indeed, much the commonest tendency in the Germanies was not so much totally to annul such reforms as had already been pro­ mulgated, willingly or otherwise, as to slow down and limit their appli­ cation. The long-term result was that official minds everywhere were painfully divided. On the one hand, the thesis that the material interests of the state required it to proceed to the emancipation of the Jews now seemed to all to be undeniable. On the other, few doubted that to proceed to emancipation was to engender social and political changes which, as members of the governing class, they were among the least willing to swallow. Like so many other dilemmas of contemporary government, there was in this a reflection of the great caesura that now separated the age that had ended in 1789 from the one which may rea­ sonably be said to have begun in 1815. As a source of intellectual and moral irritation it would for some time be especially on view in Prussia— perhaps because the bureaucratic rigour with which that kingdom’s rulers and officials applied themselves to the matter of the Jews in the early decades of the century was of much the same order as that with which they applied themselves to other, and to their minds weightier, topics.

And were to remain so until 1870.

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IV

Compared with Austria, the Unes along which policy on the Jews was made to move in the other German states were generally stiff, narrow, and, if anything, more deeply etched in acid. An edict promulgated by the duchess of Sachsen-Meiningen in 1811 to consolidate and reorder the multiple restrictions governing the private, communal, and eco­ nomic lives ofJews who had been allowed to reside in the duchy, begins, to be sure, very much in the proper spirit of the times, with the affirm­ ation, that she is ‘At all times moved by the wish to concede and grant the greatest possible equality of rights to my trusted subjects without dis­ crimination between religions’?5 And, as in the Josephine Toleranzpatent, one of the principal notes struck is that of improvement and education. ‘The spread of common beneficial knowledge missing from the educa­ tion of indigenous Jews’ is to be encouraged, all schools are to be opened to them without restriction and on the same basis of entidement as other children, and, ‘to prevent all misunderstanding, they are expressly exempted from those specific lectures that are devoted to instruction in [the Christian] religion’. Moreover, ‘all poorJewish boys who show talent for the sciences’ will be assured of support as will be those who show ‘exceptional talent for the arts’?6 The edict was drawn up with some care. The ducal official instructed to prepare a draft took the trouble to study contemporary legislation on the Jews that had been promulgated in France (specifying the special attention he had paid to the Napoleonic decrees of 1806, 1807, and 1808), in Frankfurt, and in the grand duchy of Baden?7 Austria is not mentioned in his report, but it is unlikely that he and his colleagues, or the duchess herself, were unaware of what had been decided in Vienna long before and had been in the process of (grad­ ual) implementation for several decades since. But in any event, what marked the edict, apart from the Josephine emphasis on education, improvement, and the implicit distinction between ‘useful’ and dispens­ able Jews, was the insistence on their being subject to a regime of stringent social control. Their lives as private individuals would be con­ strained by a string of social, administrative, and economic rules designed to propel them into predetermined ‘useful’ and appropriate crafts and commercial channels. But in their communal affairs too they would be subject to the higher will of their ruler as never before. Internal commu­ nal arrangements, rabbinical (especially judicial) authority, the qualities required ofparnassim—all these were meticulously laid down. Above all, 35 Ducal Edict of 5 Jan. 1811. Staatsarchiv Meiningen, Inneres Alt, 42, 1373. I am gratefill to Mr Franz Levi for providing me with this and related documents. 36 Ibid., clause 20. 37 Memorandum by Schwendler, 4 Mar. 1810. Thüringer Staatschiv, Inneres Alt, 42,1393.

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their community would not be allowed to grow. Other than in excep­ tional circumstances foreign Jews would not be allowed to settle. And those who had now, under the terms of the edict, been recognized at last as subjects of the duchy, would be prevented from increasing in number by the simple rule that no more than one son from each family would be allowed to marry and raise a family of his own.38 Sachsen-Meiningen, however typical, was politically and in every other way, a negligible quantity. It was Prussia, where Frederick Il’s Rev­ idiertes Generalprivilegium und Reglement of 1750 set the tone in all matters relating to its Jewish population for at least a century, that would count for most in Germany from this time on pari passu with the steady growth of Prussian power, influence, and territory. In spirit and purpose the Prussian Generalreglement was closer kin to Maria Theresas legislation than to her heir’s edict of toleration in that it consolidated a longestablished regime in a particularly strict, uncompromising, and onerous manner. Prussian Jews, like those of virtually all other German states, had long been heavily policed with a view, on the one hand, to the severe limita­ tion—and, if possible, reduction—of their numbers39 (on the grounds that Jews were intrinsically undesirable) and, on the other hand, to the squeezing of the highest possible return in taxes from them consistent with maintaining them as a source of revenue. To these ends the key to the regulations of 1750 was the continuing division of the Jewish popu­ lation into those who might, and those who might not, aspire to the blessed condition of Schutzjuden (‘protected’Jews). This was a category derived from the thirteenth-century classification ofJews as ‘serfs of the chamber’ (rather than of particular territorial lords) who, while taxed by the emperor, were entitled to his protection. In practice, the privilege of taxing them and the corresponding duty of protecting them came gener­ ally to be farmed out from time to time, or sold outright, to the territor­ ial princes and to the free cities. In Prussia, at all events, the relevant taxes were numerous, heavy, and arbitrary. They included simple capitation taxes, taxes on passage, taxes on temporary residence, taxes on entry into specific occupations, taxes on changes in personal status. They could be humiliating and mean-spirited and they could be ingenious. Marriage, for example, was heavily restricted and regulated, ostensibly in pursuit of the general purpose of keeping the Jewish population down. But matters were eased somewhat for certain classes of Jews on condition that the 38 Edict of 5 Jan. 1811, clause 2. 39 The best measure of the Jewish population of Prussia proper is the census return for 1811 (after the loss of Polish territories under the Treaty of Tilsit of 1807, therefore, and before the recuperation of Posen and the annexation of the Rhineland by the terms of the 1845 settlement). Some 32,000 Jews were counted out of a total population of about 6 million or a little over one-half of 1 per cent. It is to be noted that 50 per cent of all who might at this time be reasonably categorized as German Jews lived in Prussia.

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ruler’s thirst for state revenue was slaked somewhat by purchase of fixed quantities of the inferior goods produced at the royal porcelain factory. While the policy of seeking to reduce the number ofjews in the king­ dom by all possible means was, of course, an ancient one with ancient roots, in practice it too had tended increasingly to be geared to the now all but universal distinction—but drawn especially sharply in Prussia— between ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ or ‘unproductive’Jews. But however sharp the distinction between ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ might be in theory, every­ thing depended in practice on how the bureaucracy chose to apply it; and, too, to what extent, if at all, those lucky enough to be classed as priv­ ileged Schutzjuden were prepared (or were sufficiently audacious) to protest and fight an expulsion order on behalf of brethren who were less fortunate. Beggars, pedlars, and vagrants fell so clearly into the category of the ‘useless’ that it was generally conceded in Jewish circles that there was nothing to be done for them. Yet from the state’s point of view, com­ munal functionaries—rabbis, cantors, teachers, ritual slaughterers, and the like—were equally ‘useless’. What of them? How were the settled, privilegedJews to deal with their cases? Harshest of all the elements of the Prussian system, but exceedingly revealing of the logic underlying the network of obligations and prohibitions in which its Jewish subjects were enveloped, was the rule that the organized community—consisting for all practical purposes of the high-grade, especially privileged, and neces­ sarily affluent Schutzjuden who led it—was to be held responsible for the conduct of all members of the community. This, it needs to be stressed, was no mere matter of general understanding. It was a formal, legally established responsibility. It covered all points at which the interests of the state touched on the affairs of the individual: full and prompt payment of taxes, as might be expected, but also bankruptcies and similar financial or economic failures and delinquencies and common law crimes and mis­ demeanours as well. This holding of the community’s leaders to account for the conduct of all their people reflected the persistence into modern times of the classic basis on which the alien sovereign power was likely, if at all, to acquiescence in the existence of an autonomous Jewish commu­ nity within its territory: an equally ancient, deeply rooted, a priori distrust of Jews as such and a lack of confidence in the state’s ability to police the Jews except through the instrumentality of the Jews’ own institutions. It meant, however, that the elders of each community were held in perpet­ ual hostage for the good behaviour of their flock and that, these being the principles on which their community was policed, they themselves had little choice but to seek the fullest possible control over their social and economic inferiors. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, not least in view of what had occurred west of the Rhine, it had become obvious to all that the entire system was intolerably vexatious and anachronistic. When in 1800, after repeated applications by the parnassim

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of the Prussian communities and thirteen years of internal debate within the Berlin bureaucracy itself, the principle of collective responsibility was abolished, a new order for Prussian Jewry began. However, while the abolition of the rule went far to dismantle the invisible, legal ghetto in which the Jews had been confined, it did not in itself establish their for­ mal equality with others in the kingdom. Nor did the vastly more com­ prehensive and far-reaching Edict on the Civil Status of the Jews in the State of Prussia issued by King Frederick William on 11 March 1812, even though that, ostensibly, was what it provided for. The Prussian edict laid down the primary and crucial rule, that Jews domiciled in Prussia were henceforth to be considered natives (Einländer) and citizens of Prussia and that as such they were to ‘enjoy equal civil rights and liberties with Christians’. The category of Schutzjuden was abolished. Jews were no longer to be burdened with special taxes. They would be free to settle in towns as well as in the country. They would require no special permission to marry. Even peddling by Jews was to be subject to the same police regulations as peddling by non-Jews. For their part, Jews would be obliged to adopt surnames and to employ the Ger­ man language in their business records and transactions. They would be liable for military service on the same basis as other citizens. The judicial functions of their rabbis were to come to an end. Although this was not as sweeping as the full emancipation decreed in Paris, it went far beyond the Austrian Toleranzpatent of 1782 and so set Prussia ahead of all other German states, at least until 1848. It was the cre­ ation of an officialdom that not only tended exceedingly strongly to see itself as the faithful guardian of the interests of the state, but, remarkably, had good cause to do so. But the edict has to be understood too as part— a small part—of the general inclination to contemplate reform of gov­ ernment and society that followed in the wake of Prussia’s military defeat at the hands of Napoleon at Jena, the drastic amputatory terms of the Peace of Tilsit of 1807, the cumulative impact of French political and constitutional ideas, and the concrete examples offered by France itself and by France’s satellites in other parts of Germany. The Prussian king and bureaucracy were determined to think hard about the structure and quality of their state; and in their anxiety to clear away as much as pos­ sible of what were recognized as the inefficiencies of the ancien régime and to learn from their enemies, many of the specific reforms introduced turned out to be analogous, if not identical, with those that had been decreed in revolutionary and then Napoleonic Paris. Serfdom was abol­ ished, the power of the guilds was reduced almost to a nullity, freedom to take up previously restricted crafts and occupations was granted and other (although not all) impediments to free trade removed, the officer corps was opened (to some extent) to commoners, the basis for a mass army was laid, the army’s disciplinary system was humanized, the school system was

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reorganized and rationalized, a proper statistical bureau was set up, and, finally, some progress towards orderly, cabinet government at the centre was made as well. The special edict on the Jews took longer than most to work its way through the machine, but it was certainly of a piece with the other reforms. It too followed from a recognition that the old regulatory system was anachronistic and injurious to the state; that it was one among many other impediments to the effort to maximize economic perform­ ance; and that it was a potential source of political disaffection. IfJews were treated badly, and knew they were likely to be treated better else­ where, what grounds were there for expecting them to be loyal to the state? What was the point of applauding the fact that the treatment meted out to them encouraged them to emigrate if, in the real world, it was the ‘useful’ Jews who were the first to leave? But if the post-Jena, post-Tilsit reforms shared with those legislated in France, and those imposed direcdy by the French in the Rhineland, the same centralist and rational spirit, there was a respect in which they were fundamentally different. In Prussia they were not derived, and did not purport to be derived, from first political and moral, let alone universal, principles. Prussian reforms were pragmatic and opportunistic.40 They were intended to maximize and mobilize the resources of the state and were governed by what its master and his loyal servants considered expe­ dient, not virtuous. They were therefore rarely clear-cut. The nobility was required to serve the state in ways and to a degree that were without precedent in Prussian history. It was not deprived of all its rights and priv­ ileges, nor was it wholly subordinated to the crown. The peasantry was liberated—by stages—but neither fully provided for nor totally freed of its feudal obligations. So too in the case of the Jews. Of the issues that remained unsettled in their regard two were salient. One was ostensibly formal. The other ran very deep. The Edict referred to the possibility ofJews being admitted to the public service. But it did not prescribe it, nor did it explicitly authorize it. Would they then be admitted to the ranks ofgovernment officials, to the judiciary, to the offi­ cer corps after all? Would they be allowed to serve, say, as school and uni­ versity teachers? All that was promised was that the question would be taken up ‘in the course of time’. The other issue was that of the Jews’ social fate. This was an older, still thornier issue, views on which would be propounded from this point on, as we shall see, with steadily mount­ ing stridency and bitterness. The Prussian bureaucrats, for their part, did wonder, however. What was to become of these people? Would they ‘forget Palestine’ when they were at long last permitted to be fully natur­ alized in Europe? Would they ‘perhaps go on to believe that Jesus was the Except, perhaps, but then only in part, in the case of the educational reforms associ­ ated with Wilhelm von Humboldt.

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Messiah once they were no longer under any sort of compulsion to await another?’41 Official thinking at this stage turned chiefly on Dohm’s con­ cept of bürgerliche Verbesserung (civil improvement), the notion that they were as they were because of the way they had long been treated, the corollary of which was that if they were treated differently they would behave differently. Since ‘for the better’ was understood to amount to being like everyone else, few doubted that in the event of‘improvement’ being achieved, the state, at any rate, would stand to benefit. Social coherence would increase, a not unimportant source of social tension would be eliminated, a substantial addition to the sum total of ‘useful’ citizens would have been made. All, therefore, would be for the best in the near-Panglossian world to which the masters of the state aspired and in which, ultimately, the foundation of policy remained, as always, raison d'état. However, not all in Prussia, even in the administration itself, could bring themselves to subscribe to so functional and culturally neutral a view of the matter. Even granted that freedom for the Jews, not exclud­ ing the non-political freedom to prosper, would have to be contingent on their acceptance and internalization of Prussian requirements, it was much less clear precisely what those requirements might be. Besides, a look at opinion among the Jews themselves revealed that there was no unanimity there either on any of the issues, least of all on the matter of social integration. The Jews who tended to accept the idea of bürgerliche Verbesserung as indeed representing the condition they would be happy to aim for tended, in the first instance, to be those who had a great deal to gain economically and politically from what it seemed to offer. These, typically, were of the class ofparnassim and Schutzjuden who, by virtue of their de facto or de jure leadership of their respective communities, had long regarded themselves as bearing a disproportionately heavy commu­ nal burden ofwhich they were anxious to be rid. By and large, they were those who, in their private affairs too, were most impeded by anti-Jewish regulations.42 Whatever their case, they were therefore very far from being representative of their brethren, the more so as there were other, conflicting schools of thought. There were those, well represented in Berlin itself, as it happened, who were prepared to go only part of the way towards the kind of ‘improvement’ Dohm and his school had had in mind, because they wished to preserve a distinctive Jewish way of life, and believed that there were ways and means of doing so that were com­ patible with the grant (and acceptance) of civil rights and the satisfaction 41 J. W. Süvem, a specialist in education serving in the Ministry of Religions and an associate of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Cited in Raphael Mahler, Divrei yemei yIsrael: dont aharonim, ii (Merhavia, 1954), 129. ,42 Miriam Bodian, ‘Ha-yazamim ha-yehudiim be-Berlin, ha-medina ha-absolutistit, ve-“shipur mazavam ha-ezrahi shel ha-yehudim” ba-mahazit ha-sheniya shel ha-me’ah ha-18’, Zion, 49, 2 (1984), 159-84.

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of the demands the modern state normally made on its citizens. A third school took a wholly opposite course, rejecting what it considered to be the poisoned gift of civil liberty on the grounds that, if accepted, it would inexorably undermine all that the Jews had traditionally stood for and all that it, at any rate, wished to maintain. The members of this school had no interest in bürgerliche Verbesserung in any way that Christian Dohm or Wilhelm von Humboldt or Karl von Hardenberg (Prussian Chancellor at the time the Edict was issued) or anyone else in Berlin might understood the term. But while these differences within German Jewry, much mag­ nified and deepened and in the process too, as we shall see, of spreading with fair rapidity throughout the Jewish population of the continent, were due to become of first importance for the internal social and political development of the Jews themselves, they were of negligible interest to the Prussian political class. Its approach to the matter of the Jews was dictated less by direct observation and accumulated knowledge than by its own, idiosyncratic, internally generated, exceedingly inflex­ ible views on society, state, and nation and an underlying, if somewhat less than universal, hostility to Jewry perse. Prompdy after its promulgation in France, Napoleon’s distinctly and viscerally anti-Jewish ‘infamous decree’ had been extended to the then French-controlled Rhineland. Ten years later, as we have seen,43 it was allowed to become a dead letter— without much fuss or discussion. In the Rhineland itself, now under Prussian control, this particular Napoleonic decree was kept in force for another three decades. But it is to developments much further to the east, in Poland, where the true centre of gravity of European Jewry lay, that closest attention is due.

V Jews had long been tolerated by the kings of Poland and, for the most part, by the magnates, the real rulers of the country, as well. Much less so by the Church, however, and not at all by the urban classes who saw them as competitors in commerce and crafts. The peasants, especially those whom magnates and lesser landowners had placed under the supervision ofJewish bailiffs and leaseholders and who were encouraged by all, king, nobility, Church, and city burghers, to regard the Jews as their greatest enemies, loathed them. The weakness of the Jews, but in some ways their strength as well, lay in the fact that their function and influence hinged on their role as sources of income, on their being susceptible, that is to say, to being regularly milked by whoever held political authority over them: king, elders in the royal towns, magnates, lower nobility, the Church. ° See n. 33.

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They were not perceived, however, as a wholly foreign or illegitimate component of society—as were their cousins in the Germanies, for example. Nor, in so far as such matters lend themselves to judgement, were they. They were not recent arrivals. Set against the burghers’ right to limit their presence in particular towns or to exclude them totally, were a host of formal charters and licences according them countervailing ‘privileges’ of one kind or another, the sum total of which could be seen as confirming Polish Jewry as virtually one of the established estates of the realm. Yet, privileges notwithstanding, they were forever vulnerable to an arbitrary exercise of authority that bordered on, and at times had posi­ tive recourse to, outright persecution—a vulnerability tempered only by the degree to which, as individuals or as members of particular commu­ nities, they were perceived as useful to whoever was in power nationally or locally as objects of extortion. In this sense, their position and status and the terms in which these were perceived were not, in the final analy­ sis, radically different from those of their brethren in central Europe except, as we shall see, that the consequences were if anything more poignant. It was the condition of the state that differed. Poland, towards the end of the eighteenth century, was teetering on the brink of final dis­ solution. With the Russians at the gates and the other dangers facing what had been left of Greater Poland after the Second Partition looming, minds in the court of King Stanislaw Augustus Poniatowski and in the Commonwealth’s last parliament, the so-called Quadrennial Sejm (1788-92), turned, as rarely before, to the idea ofputting some order into the country’s affairs—at which point the idea of taking up the matter of the Jews met, as had so rarely been the case before, with a not wholly nega­ tive response. This was true of the king, of some of the more far-sighted members of the magnate and gentry classes—and therefore of the Sejm— and to some extent of Polish intellectuals and publicists as well. As in the west, a small body of literature developed in which the problem of the Jews was discussed in some detail, often with considerable penetration, and with a view to how this awkward, but to some minds potentially very useful, people might be integrated into Polish society and made to bring greater benefit to the much battered Polish state.44 The immediate problem lay in the fact that, for the most part, the Jews of Poland were deeply impoverished and, as a body, heavily in debt—to the magnates, to the city burghers, and to a high degree to the Church. But although their uses as a source of revenue to the men of power were therefore judged, probably cor reedy, to have diminished beyond the 44 Mayir Vereté, ‘Ha^a'ot polaniyot le-fitron tentoriali shel “she’elat ha-yehudim” ’, 6,3 (1941), 148-55; Adolf Haber, ‘Ha-pundekaim ha-yehudiim ba-publi?istika hapolanit shel “Ha-seim ha-gadol” (1788-1792)’, Gal-‘Ed, 2 (1975), 1-24; Hillel Levine, Economic Origins ofAntisemitism: Poland and itsJews in the Early Modem Period (New Haven, 1991), ch. 5.

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point of recuperation, they continued to be subject to a host of overlap­ ping imposts, prohibitions, quotas, and sundry other burdens and humili­ ations—all of which were rendered the more untenable by reason of the inefficacy of central government. It was only as a consequence of action from the centre, in practice by the king, that these matters stood any chance at all of being sorted out: more specifically, that an initiative to add the matter of the Jews to the list of constitutional and social reforms that were being put before the Sejm was likely or indeed possible. In the terms in which the plan of reform was conceived, there may be discerned, however, some of the threads in which the affairs and prospects of the Jews of Poland were fatally entangled—and some of the consequent causes of failure. The question of what to do about the Jews had been brought up in the Sejm before. In 1775, when the poll tax to which they were liable was raised, the measure was condemned by some members as a fiscal absurd­ ity, given the steadily deepening pauperization and the vagrancy that were known to be afflicting Polish Jewry. To which other members retorted with the old charges: that Jews played too great a role in certain trades anyway, that they competed commercially and, what is more, dis­ honestly with the burghers and the guild craftsmen to the latter’s great detriment and to the detriment of the Polish urban population generally. To the practical question, what then was to be done about them, a popu­ lar response was that they needed to be settled on the land—to which the countercharge was that the idea did not bear examination. Where, precisely, were they to be settled? Was it the impoverished among them— the obvious candidates for agricultural settlement—who were seriously expected to set themselves up as farmers on the basis of their own resources, namely without public assistance? If so, were they to be allowed to own the land allotted them? And what was to be their civil status? Were they to be enserfed? Ifso, were Jews expected to agree to that? It was pointed out in an anonymous paper prepared for the Quadrennial Sejm, that as it was the peasants, in their misery and poverty, bore the stigma of eternal disgrace, of eternal serfdom. ... If we want to encourage [other] people to till the soil, we must show them imminent advantage. Our laws forbid the Jew to inherit land. What then is left to them? Only to become peas­ ants and work for somebody else, not for themselves. Reason and experience have taught us that it will never come to this.45

The Quadrennial Sejm was thus the occasion for the first more or less serious debate on the matter of the Jews to be held in Poland. And if, as such, it prompted a host of questions to which no answers, authoritative or persuasive, were forthcoming, it was less because of unfamiliarity with 45 Cited in Artur Eisenbach, The Emancipation of the Jews in Poland, 1780-1870 (Oxford, 1991), 46.

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the subject than because no genuine, really far-reaching socio-political revolution was ever envisaged by more than a tiny handful of the partici­ pants. Were the Jews finally to be incorporated into the burgher class, for example? Were they to be liable for military service? Some voices did argue for reform somewhat along the lines of Dohm’s bürgerliche Verbesserung: the Jews had been treated unjustly; they had been deprived through no fault of their own of the means of making an honest living and in sundry other ways had been prevented from improving themselves and from providing Poland with a loyal and potentially valuable segment of the population, instead of the embittered and harmful one that they had become. Civic rights were therefore to be granted them—always provided that the existing feudal estate structure of the Commonwealth remained intact. The counterarguments (in the press and in pamphlet form) were in a more familiar vein: let the Jews first prove themselves; to release them of the obligation to do so would be to put the cart before the horse; Jews were inherently unsuitable for military service; the essential thing, in any event, was to change their socio-economic structure, not that of Poland as a whole. It was consistent with the dominant outlook that the reforms introduced in Austria by Joseph II received more atten­ tion as models for possible application in Poland than those recently decreed by the French National Assembly. The Declaration of the Rights of Man did arouse some interest, although commonly and comfortably judged remote from, and therefore inapplicable to, Polish circumstances. The emancipation of the Jews of France two years later received only the barest notice in the Warsaw press and was largely ignored.46 But that was not the whole of the sad, brief story of the handling of the matter of the emancipation of the Jews in the twilight years of the old Polish Commonwealth, nor of the impact, however marginal, of distant, foreign examples. Tellingly, the man who played the central role in the attempt, such as it was, to introduce order into all that related to the pres­ ence of the Jews in Poland with a view to establishing a rational basis on which they might co-habit peacefully with its other inhabitants, was not a Pole. He was an Italian clergyman of exceptional curiosity, talent, and energy who had chanced in 1783 to find a political role for himself in Poland, Scipione Piattoli (1749—1809), counsellor and secretary to King Stanislaw Augustus. On a visit to France in 1789, it is believed, he became interested in Malesherbes s views (on which more below) on the need to improve the social and economic condition ofJews in Alsace who, he noted, unlike the Jews of south-west France and the Avignonnais, had much in common culturally and socio-economically with the Jews of Poland. On his return to Poland in 1790 and his entry into politics as an active and diligent 46 Eisenbach, Emancipation, 63-6.

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participant in the constitution-making of the period, he set out to devise and then promote a plan that comprised two interlocked components: a detailed blueprint for a consolidated and rationalized legal system that would enable the Jews not merely to live, but to prosper, in the constitu­ tional monarchy-to-be; and the setting out of the financial terms under which all those who had a material interest in the perpetuation of the status quo—or whose approval was needed if any such reform was to be implemented—were to be squared. Briefly put, a bargain was to be struck. The Jews were to be granted virtually all civil rights, released from all specific constraints and ‘privileges’, and permitted to purchase and own land and housing. They would retain a degree ofjuridical autonomy amounting effectively (or so, in Piattoli s view, it could be argued) to their having the status of a distinct estate. There would be special, but reason­ ably tolerant, concessions regarding the perpetually vexed matter of their dress, their beards, and all else that helped to distinguish them visibly and publicly from everyone else.47 Finally and crucially, the money by which the nobility, the Church, and the burghers—and the crown itself—were to be paid off in exchange for their acquiescence in this radical change would come from the Jews themselves. Piattoli, and those who served as his interlocutors on behalf of Polish Jewry,48 believed 20 million zlotys, payable in ten annual instalments as a gift to the crown, would go as far as was needed to compensate those for whom the proposed emancipation meant immediate financial loss. And thus, as Piattoli put it, ‘if our plan succeeds we will do an unfortunate nation a necessary good deed and obtain a very substantial annual subvention for the Treasury of the Republic’.49 In pursuit of these two ends, the latter especially, he had the somewhat hesitant support of his master, the king. ‘The essential thing is that Your Majesty’s debts be paid, regardless of whether it takes fifteen or twenty years,’ he wrote to Stanislaw Augustus. Twenty million zlotys was a tremendous sum and Piattoli was right to think that money counted for 47 Piattoli’s exceedingly elaborate ‘Plan pour les Juifs’ will be found in Artur Eisenbach, et al. (eds.), Materialy do dziejôtv Sejmu Czteroletniego, Institut Historii Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Wroclaw, Warsaw, and Cracow, 1969), vi. 350-72. 48 As any go-between would have done, Piattoli tended to portray the king to the Jews as hugely benevolent, and the Jews to the king as infinitely appreciative and grateful. After one of his talks with a Jewish interlocutor, he reported to Stanislaw Augustus that only good could result from action that accorded with the king’s views and was taken under his auspices. That way ‘one was sure . . . that we were guided by no private interest, that the Father of the country, the guardian angel of Poland, has turned his attention to the unhappy Jewish nation and that he intends to ease its condition and provide it with a tran­ quil and decent existence in the Republic’. Upon which, Piattoli told the king, ‘My man had tears in his eyes and left me to give a full account to his mistress’, the context suggest­ ing that the ‘mistress’ in the case was the woman landowner to whom the Jew was bound in some way. On the common Jewish response to these proposals for constitutional change, see below, pp. 107 ff. 49 Piattoli to Kollataj, 29 Nov. 1791, in Eisenbach, Materialy, 299, no. 8.

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a great deal in this affair: ‘If the Jews fail to find the means to pay their debts and compensate the hereditary lords, the bill will never pass the Diet and, in that case, all will be lost for Your Majesty.’50 Twenty million zlotys may in fact have been too small a sum to be persuasive. But the chief consideration fuelling the opposition was most probably objection to change as such—which, while not absolute, was effectively over­ whelming. In a ‘nobleman’s republic’ in which the nobility, apart from all its other privileges, had virtually exclusive right to ownership of land, even noted ‘liberals’ and ‘reformers’ were opposed to anything that might seriously undermine the established constitutional structure. Andrzej Zamoyski, sometime Crown Chancellor of Poland, leader of the more liberal strain among the landed nobility, and one who had sought to set an example by freeing his serfs, opposed the grant of civic rights to Jews. His view was that they should have the status of tolerated foreigners. Hugo Kollataj, another noted reformer, was an ally of Piattoli’s; but he wanted to preserve the privileges of nobility, the town burghers’ corpor­ ate privileges, the estate system, and the established inequality of the var­ ious classes and estates before the law as well. He was even opposed to the abolition of serfdom. The nobility, it may be recalled, had been over­ whelmingly opposed to giving non-Roman Catholic Christians (the Orthodox, the Lutherans, and the Calvinists) political rights until well into the eighteenth century. Only in 1768 did ‘dissidents’ get ‘partial equality’. They were admitted to municipal citizenship in 1775. They lost it again two years later. Opposition to the abolition of serfdom and the corvée was still more intense. As for the Jews, to the vast majority of minds there could be no question at all of emancipating them. Some thought any Jewish cause and any one who supported it were ipso facto ridiculous. ‘Good Christians, my dear Piattoli, are infinitely pained by your passion for the Israelite,’ Ignacy Potocki wrote to the king’s adviser, suggesting they meet to discuss it. ‘Would you, as the new Moses, have a moment in the morning for a gentile?’51 But Piattoli seems to have been convinced that if the magnates were well compensated for the loss of cer­ tain rights—rights which he did not doubt were, in themselves, ‘abusifs à la vérité’—they would eventually succumb.52 The stiffest opposition of all to change in the status of the Jews was voiced by the middle-class burgher estate. After repeated and tedious haggling over the precise terms on which certain prohibitions were to be lifted, and a surprise demand at one point that the entire agreement be revised, the Italian cleric was reduced to despair. ‘They quibbled about almost every word, one of the burghers dealing with the religious clause 50- Piattoli to Stanislaw Augustus, 2 Jan. 1792, in Eisenbach, Material?, 305-6, no. 19. 51 4Jan. [1792], ibid. 310, no. 25. 52 Piattoli to Stanislaw Augustus, 10 Jan. 1792, ibid. 314-15, no. 37.

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like an inquisitor of the most inflexible kind,’ he complained to the king. They insisted on ‘endless corrections and amendments, all of which were dictated by prejudice, hatred, and, in one word, by ancient ideas’.53 But the burghers, the small middle or upper-middle class in Poland, had long experience in pressing for what they regarded as their rights. Most towns in Poland were private, belonging either to noble landowners or to the Church (to monastic orders, for example). Only a minority were royal towns, the practical meaning of which was that their inhabitants pos­ sessed all civic freedoms including the right to own land; and this was the segment of the burgher estate that was most determined and vociferous of all in its opposition to a relaxation of the regime to which the Jews were subject. Townsfolk of all categories are commonly estimated to have formed about a sixth of the country’s population at the time. Of these some two-thirds were Jews and a third Christians (about 10 per cent and 5 per cent of the total population respectively). In effect, because differ­ ent laws applied to them, Jews and Christians constituted two separate but exceedingly unequal classes. To be domiciled in a city or town was one thing, to be admitted to formal ‘citizenship’ was another. But it was urban citizenship that was the indispensable condition of economic activity at every level except the very lowest. Without it there could be no membership of a guild, no right to exercise an artisan craft, no access to a confraternity of merchants entitled to carry on a particular trade, no political or even semi-political rights such as participation in the making of municipal law, voting in elections, or holding of public office. Not being members of the burgher estate, Jews were excluded from political rights even in towns which they were permitted to inhabit and they were excluded again, with no less serious consequences, from the economic benefits that citizenship provided as well. Even their right to own town plots of land on which to build their homes was heavily restricted— limited, in effect, to a few ‘private towns’ belonging to well-disposed magnates.54 When the burghers proved to be immovable in their refusal to countenance any real relaxation of these rules, Piattoli’s plan was fated to fail. In the long term, the effect ofthis intermingling ofwatered-down, but not inauthentic post-1789 ideas with ideas of a much older, distincdy feu­ dal and medieval origin and content was fatally to box together the related, but still separable subjects, of reform of the Jewish condition, relations between Jews and non-Jews, the political status of the Jews, the political constitution of the Polish state, and the general structure and quality of Polish society. It continued to be thought entirely reasonable to expect the Jews to pay—and pay very heavily—in exchange for being 53 Piattoli to Stanislaw Augustus, 10 Jan. 1792, ibid. 321, no. 44. 54 Eisenbach, Emancipation, 24—30.

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freed of burdens arbitrarily placed upon them and the harassment to which they were perpetually subject. It was thought proper and reason­ able that the heirs of those who had placed those burdens upon the Jews should be compensated for the effect the cancellation of these impos­ itions was likely to have on their pockets. It was believed that the liber­ ators of the Jews, for their part, were entitled to compensation too. But it was at least as commonly accepted that a plan to alter the condition of the Jews for the better must in some way be illegitimate—an illegitimacy demonstrated by the provision that the Jews buy their release from the rulers of Poland. It appears almost natural therefore that on the Polish side only so bizarre a figure as a displaced Italian clergyman could have made a serious move to bring the emancipation of the Jews in pre-partition Poland at least into the realm of speculative discussion. Although, that said, for reasons which will be gone into in some detail in due course, there was always—or would have been had anything come of Piattoli’s efforts—Jewish reluctance to envisage change to contend with. Cer­ tainly, for an individual Jew to think and act for himself in these matters was to swim against the immensely powerful tide ofJewish conservatism and was exceedingly difficult and in practice very much rarer than in western Europe. One such very rare being was Shelomo (or Salomon) Polonus of Vilna, a doctor of medicine, physician to the king, and a man of general culture as well. He was well acquainted with the political writ­ ings and events of the day. Jie was privy to the proposals on the status of the Jews that the abbé Piattoli had prepared for submission to the king and to the Sejm. And he had a plan of his own which the grant of full emanci­ pation in 1791 by the French National Assembly had evidently encouraged him to work on. Its general tenor is indicated by his references to develop­ ments in France and the arguments advanced by the abbé Grégoire: If 50,000 Jews have convinced the French nation, this refined and enlightened nation of Europe, that. . . they will help their country with the wealth of their life, if these Jews have been granted civic rights and have been put on an equal footing with any Frenchman, then there are even fewer reasons to doubt whether the nearly one million Jews in the Polish state will through enlighten­ ment become happy and useful to their country.

However, the content of Polonus s scheme, after necessary adjustment to Polish circumstances, was more modest. He wanted Jews to be allowed to live in all towns without exception and without hindrance, to engage in any form of trade, craft, and industry they chose, to be admitted to the guilds, to be called up with other citizens for active military service, and at least gradually to be granted civic rights as well—by which, however, Polonus meant no more than municipal rights. Full political rights in contemporary, feudal Poland were too obviously out of the question and were not referred to. And even then, such civic rights as were granted

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would be limited either by the social category of the candidates or by time. They were to be granted to those who had opened, or had undertaken to open, a factory and to soldiers who had completed five years’ military service, for example. They would be granted to other Jews only after a lapse of twenty years. Exceptionally, persons who had ‘distinguished themselves by their enlightenment and [were] using it to improve the nation’ were to be ‘adorned’ with citizenship im­ mediately.55 But in any event, the differences between the Polish Commonwealth and revolutionary France—or France under the ancien régime, for that matter—were, of course, far too great to be overcome, even marginally and symbolically by the enactment of such modest reforms as either Polonus or Piattoli had in mind, even if there had been the will among the greater and lesser nobility to consider such a step. There was never any contact or dialogue between representative Jews and representative members of the Polish nobility that was, or could be, conducted on a basis that was remotely analogous to that on which Malesherbes had been prepared to conduct his discussions with the delegates from Bor­ deaux. There were no Grégoires in the Polish branch of the Roman Catholic Church. No group of burghers in Poland were prepared to take up a position in respect of their Jewish neighbours analogous to that taken by the civic leaders of Bordeaux in respect of theirs. And there was no substantial group within Polish Jewry itself whose status was analogous to that of the Jews of Bordeaux, let alone one that was willing, as they were, to move into the half-way house of Jewish emancipation. Meanwhile, with the Russians at the gates of Warsaw and poised for invasion, the attention of those who sought both to lead the country in the short term and to make it effectively governable in the longer term passed to other matters. In 1792 the Sejm was dissolved. Three years later what was left of independent Poland was snuffed out. The issue of the Jewish presence in Poland as a distinctly Polish responsibility and problem was not to arise for another century and a quarter. And what was most remarkable, and central to the Jewish experience in the country, was that in this long interim the refusal of indigenous Polish centres of influence to countenance any really substantial reordering of the legal and eco­ nomic strait-jacket in which the Jews of their country were confined changed hardly at all. Even under the impermanent French puppet regime, the duchy of Warsaw (1807-15), the Polish ministers responsible 55 Shelomo Polonus, ‘Projekt wzgledem reformy Zydow’, cited in Eisenbach, Eman­ cipation, 89; Israel Bartal, ‘ “Ha-model ha-mishni”—?arfat ke-mekor hashpa‘ah betahalikhei ha-modemizaziya shel yehudei mizrah eiropa (1772-1863)’, in Yerahmiel Cohen (ed.), Ha-mahapekha ha-çarfatit ue-rishuma (jerusalem, 1991), 272-5.

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for daily government were quite as firmly set on preventing Jews from being granted civic and political rights as any of their predecessors had been. They had the advantage, moreover, that their new, non-resident ruler, King Frederick Augustus of Saxony, was considerably less sympa­ thetic to reform in this domain than their own King Stanislaw Augustus had been. In July 1808 the king went so far as to ask Paris for special authority to suspend for ten years the electoral rights that the new French model legislation promulgated in the duchy appeared to grant to the Jews. His stated grounds were that it was ‘beyond doubt’ that even the numerous class of ostensibly useful Jews living in the duchy of Warsaw as merchants and industrialists were without a claim to the rights and priv­ ileges the constitution accorded citizens who were not of the nobility. As, in the event, no formal decision was taken one way or the other in Paris, in Warsaw itself, as the elections drew near, a decree depriving the Jews of electoral rights was promulgated (7 September 1808) by the king on his own authority and on the following day the duchy’s minister of the interior instructed the prefects confidentially not to include Jews in the register of citizens. Should Jews go so far as to claim the right to be included on the roll and to vote, they were to be told that no instructions from higher authority permitting registration had been received. A little later, on 17 October, a decree explicitly suspending Jews’ civil and polit­ ical rights was issued, but perhaps the real interest in this last step lies less in its formal, if to be sure, all-embracing, content, than in the attempt made to sweeten it somewhat and reduce its blatant incompatibility with the new constitution. It was to be in force for ten years only, it was announced; and the decree was glossed with an expression of‘the hope that within this period they [the Jews] will eradicate those traits which have so divided them from all others’. It follows that beside the unmistakable evidence of the PoEsh nobility’s intention to obstruct the extension of political and economic liberties beyond the narrow circle to which they were accustomed to Emit them, there were some signs none the less of a certain awkwardness and a reflec­ tion too, however pale and distant, of the Zeitgeist. It was accepted that a matter of general principle was involved, that the principle in question was one that civilized nations were expected to abide by, and that if they did not do so they were, at any rate, under an obligation to explain them­ selves. Jan Luszczewski, the duchy’s minister of the interior, did indeed feel called upon to argue that while ‘nobody will probably deny the Jews the right of civil liberty and equality before the law’, it was the case, on the other hand, that ‘everybody must admit that these rights may be restricted by police measures ...’ Everybody, the minister went on to say, ‘receives an equitable share of rights and freedoms in society according to the age, civilization, customs and even reEgion that he brings in’. Alas, PoEsh Jews were of a lower level of civilization than Jews in the western

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European countries. Laws restricting their access to civic rights were therefore, in his considered opinion, fully justifiable.56 In the post-Napoleonic settlement of the new European state system, the greater part of the territory of what had been the French-sponsored duchy of Warsaw was reincorporated into the Russian Empire as the semi-autonomous kingdom of Poland—soon to be known most com­ monly as ‘Congress Poland’. The Tsar of Russia was king, represented in Warsaw by a viceroy and other officials. But the ordinary administration of this rump of the old Polish Republic57 was left, by design, in the hands of Poles, more specifically much the same class of Poles—major landowners chosen from among the higher nobility—as before. Their domination of the Council of State in Warsaw was absolute, it was they who had the ears of their new, Russian overlords, and in all matters of day-to-day administration it was they and their kind who continued to make the running. So they did too, to some extent, so far as the tone and content of such public and published debate on matters of public interest as took place. The brief period of French overlordship had produced little more than a technical emancipation ofthe serfs. In practice, their lot had hardly changed: they were bound to the soil as before, as firmly ruled as ever by the owners of the estates on which they lived and for whom they laboured, and, being landless, they remained as fatally dependent on their masters for their livelihood as they were subordinate to them polit­ ically and legally. The situation of the burghers is generally held to have improved somewhat. The new semi-autonomous Polish army contained patriotic elements that, in their thirst for rebellion, would prove to be imperfectly controlled by those magnates who, having made a peace of sorts with the Russians, were now set on a course of prudent inactivity. But all in all, initially, matters in Congress Poland (as opposed to the Prussian and Austrian bits of the old Republic) were to be much as they had been a generation and more earlier. This was certainly the case so far as the Jews were concerned. As with the serfs, so with them, all moves towards emancipation were arrested. The application of such provisions of the Napoleonic civil code as might, on the one hand, have impaired the nobility’s monopoly of the owner­ ship of land and, on the other hand, have enabled some Jews materially to improve both their formal status and their economic elbow-room— those relating to rights of property, freedom to purchase and transfer property, and freedom of contract, for example—were either aborted or severely watered down. With the return of the Russians, the notion of granting the Jews civic and political rights by, for example, incorporating 56 Eisenbach, Emancipation, 137-8. 57 The Lithuanian territories had been incorporated into Russia proper. Prussia and Austria retained, with some changes, those portions of the Republic that they had seized in the course of the late eighteenth-century partitions.

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them into the burgher estate, faded totally away. The right of the burghers of certain towns, under their ancient freedom to invoke the de non tolerandis Judaeis privilege, to expel Jews who inhabited them was restored. The power to set aside a specific quarter (revir) in which Jews who were allowed to remain were compelled to reside, was maintained. A blanket prohibition on residence anywhere that was less than 20 versts (about 20 kilometres) from the Austrian and Prussian borders and a multitude of other such legal and administrative restrictions and taxes directed at the Jews exclusively were instituted or refurbished or repro­ mulgated. The question of the Jews of Poland would be looked into from time to time by the Russian authorities, but would undergo no substan­ tial change until, in the wake of the dismal failure of the 1830 rebellion against Russian rule, the process of incorporation of Russian-ruled Poland into the Russian administrative system began in earnest. The decisive engine of policy for the kingdom, as for all the other domains of the Tsar, would be none other henceforth than the one over which the Tsar exercised his own direct control in St Petersburg. The result, coupled to the long-term effects of the punishment meted out to the rebels of1830, was a further weakening of the authority and prestige and, above all, the power of Poland’s traditional landowning ruling class. The Jews, with some notable but still very rare exceptions, had taken no part in the rebellion. It had done them no good, but nor had it done them palpable harm. In its aftermath, however, there were as good and sufficient reasons for Jews in Warsaw and Lublin, as there had been previously in Kovno and Minsk—in so far to be sure, as their eyes were not wholly in their books and averted from the world outside their study halls—to begin to look to St Petersburg for relief, if relief there was ever to be.

VI

Austria, Prussia, and Russia, all absolutist, centralizing, and bureaucratiz­ ing states governed by opinionated rulers and administrators, had this in common too, that they were the promoters and beneficiaries of the destruction and partition of Poland. And this had the result, among many others, that at the end of the process of partition and the seemingly final distribution of territory under the terms of the Vienna settlement, each found itself lumbered with an unprecedentedly large and, from their point of view, deeply undesirable and problematic Jewish population. There were, however, immediate and striking differences between Prus­ sia and Austria on the one hand and Russia on the other. The successive partitions of Poland left Russia with ever larger segments of the country and also much the largest segment of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry specifi­ cally. From the Russian point of view, this was a particularly unintended,

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unwished-for, and in important respects quite bitterly resented and vexatious consequence of Russia’s successes as an expanding, imperial power. Alone of all the major European powers, the Russian Autocracy founded its approach to everything that touched upon Judaism as a faith and as a culture, and upon the Jews as a people, upon a fundamentally reli­ gious hatred. This was all the more powerful for its being extraordinarily simplistic and shot through at the same time with a deep, instinctive, and so to speak generalized xenophobia in which fear, contempt, and suspi­ cion of the alien were all combined. Now and again, at various levels of government, an effort to reconsider policy on the Jews in a spirit of calm and objectivity would occur. On several such occasions, as we shall see, a limited mitigation of its rigours was conceded. But in its fundamentals it was never reversed. On the contrary: it was cleaved to—with remarkable tenacity, it must be said—to the end. And the result was that, in contrast to what happened in the other major states of the old Europe, an eman­ cipation of the Jews was never decreed; and on the exceedingly rare and fleeting occasions when the uses of a move towards it were raised it was promptly and authoritatively rejected. It needs to be said that the Jews of what was once Greater Poland were overwhelmingly ofa type and a class and a culture that, even as early as the end of the eighteenth century, had begun to diminish in parts at least of central Europe and in a marked and accelerating fashion in the west. They were at one and the same time in much poorer, meaner, and humiliating circumstances and, by virtue of their greater numbers and the fact that they lived, typically, in denser and more coherent communities than any in the west, much more distinctively and unselfconsciously a people apart than their brethren elsewhere. Members of the western and to some extent the central European communities too had by this time begun to adopt the vernacular for everyday use and some were already well versed in it. Overwhelmingly, the Jews in independent Poland had not done so. Not until well into the nineteenth century did substantial numbers—still a minority—speak Polish or Russian or German. Great numbers (not all) read and wrote Hebrew. Greater numbers still read, wrote, and, most important of all, spoke Yiddish, having carried this essentially German tongue to Poland (much as the Iberian Jews had carried their Spanish tongue to the Balkans). They were generally more observant of the niceties of Jewish ritual than were their brethren in the west, more respectful of their rabbis, more inward looking. They were, for these reasons, very much more obviously alien, a feature that was the more marked for their belonging almost exclusively to the lower economic orders. Here and there in Poland there were, as we have seen, a handful of men who had achieved power and influence in Jewry by virtue, ultimately, of the services they performed for great men outside it. But unlike, say, the Jews of medieval Spain—with whom in some respects

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they bear comparison—there were none among them who were in any serious sense great men themselves. Still, broadly speaking, the Polish Jews of Galicia and Poznania were not ofa category that the Austrians and Prussians found entirely unfamiliar when these provinces were annexed. For the Russians, in contrast, the incorporation into the empire of sub­ stantial numbers of Jews as part of the settled population of what would later be termed ‘Congress Poland’ presented a problem of which the Autocracy had no experience and which it would prove singularly illequipped to tackle. Unlike the Austrian and Prussian bureaucracies and police, the Russ­ ian state had neither volumes of established rules and regulations nor any philosophy of government, ready-made or under discussion, that could reasonably be considered appEcable to the Jewish case. Prior to the First Partition of Poland, Russia, by long and jealously maintained tradition, had to all intents and purposes been—to use a term that would be no­ torious a century and a half later, but is appropriate here despite the anachronism—-Judenfrei. Tsar Peter I had permitted a handful of crypto­ Jews to settle in Russia to serve him. But even the great modernizer him­ self had allowed no significant, let alone visible, deviation from the rule. A papal delegate who had asked him to permit the free passage through Russia of Catholic missionaries bound for Persia and China was given the famous answer, that both Jews and Jesuits were banned from his kingdom as a matter of course.58 His daughter Elizabeth was as firm or firmer on this score during her reign (1740-61). Rejecting mercantilist arguments favouring the admission of ‘useful’ Jews to her lands, the Tsarina declared, in equally well-known terms, that she wished to derive no profit from ‘the enemies of Christ’. In short, prior to the partitions of Poland, Russia, as far as Jews were concerned, was a prohibited land to be entered, if at all, only by the occasional, especially intrepid trader or physician who came prepared to face the very real dangers consequent on discovery. Nevertheless, to present the pattern of official behaviour estab­ lished after the partitions as turning entirely on a sort of hankering for the status quo ante is to oversimplify it. It was among the peculiarities of the Russian Empire, as we shall see, that, through the workings of the harsh political and administrative logic which the Autocracy had made its own since the time of Peter the Great, many of the effects and even some of the explicit rules and instruments that had defined ‘toleration’ (and even ‘emancipation’) elsewhere, notably in Central Europe, came in practice to be detectable and operative in the course of time in Russia as well. This owed a good deal to the nature of the Russian state itself: it was one in which such traces of 58 ‘Judeos etjesuitas habemus proscriptos e regnis nostris.* Cited in Shmu’el Ettinger, ‘Medinat moskva be-yahasa el ha-yehudim’, #ok, 18, 3-4 (1953), 148 n.

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independent nobility or Church or city government as there once were had long since been wiped clean, in which the classes into which society was divided were defined with respect to each other with unparalleled rigour, and in which all subjects without any exception at all were subor­ dinated, not to say enslaved, to the person of the Tsar-despot as absolute owner and master of all he (or she) surveyed. There was therefore no way, for example, in which the feudal, landowning, and traditionally independent, not to say ungovernable, nobility and gentry of Poland (to which the Jews of Greater Poland had been subject in their time) could be fitted into such a system except, as would eventually prove to be the case, by main force and at the cost, to both Poles and Russians, of repeated rebellion. But in their case there was at least the compensating factor that the serfs who served the Polish nobility and gentry as a class could be more or less assimilated into the Russian system without real difficulty. In contrast, the Jews, being unassimilable—so far as anyone could see—into any of the categories, classes, estates, and hierarchies of which the Russian social and political order had been constructed, presented a problem that was rapidly recognized as insuperable short of drastic reforms of some not easily imaginable kind. It was therefore as good as inevitable, and at the same time wholly characteristic of the Russian style of government, that the history of Russo-Polish Jews should be heavily marked—and very heavily scarred—by periodic attempts to examine the issues they presented and to grapple with them with a measure of application and ruthlessness that remains without parallel elsewhere in Europe until the twentieth century. In practice, upon Catherine Il’s accession to the Russian throne and the dissolution of Poland as a sovereign state that followed shortly after, the matter of the Jews was instantly transformed from a topic that had been only of the most marginal interest to Russian officialdom into one that would occupy its collective mind and draw its close attention for years to come and to a degree that, in retrospect, is ever harder to credit. At a single blow in 1772, and twice again and with still larger consequences, in 1793 and 1795, the Autocracy was confronted on its own ground with the largest, most sharply defined, least acculturated—and therefore plainly least digestible—segment of the very people it had been at such pains to keep out and away. However, Catherine the Great was a woman of very different character and political outlook from Elizabeth—let alone her more distant predecessors. And it is safe to say that the spirit of the times alone would have sufficed to inhibit her and the men who served her from following past example. No one in authority in St Peters­ burg, that is to say, seriously considered ordering a mass expulsion of the Jews from the Tsarina’s new domains. No one proposed attempting their forcible conversion. The contradiction between setded, age-old Russian policy and the actual presence of a very large Jewish population on what

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was now Russian territory in an age when few at the centre of what pur­ ported to be enlightened government were likely to hold, and fewer still actually to proclaim, such beliefs about the Jews as Ivan the Terrible had held (that among the wickednesses of the Jews had been the introduction of poisons into Russia) was evident. The forthright methods Ivan had chosen to tackle the awkward pres­ ence ofJews whom he came across in the course of his territorial con­ quests,59 or those chosen by his successors—Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, for example, in similar circumstances6061 —could not be employed as freely in the eighteenth century as had been possible in the sixteenth and the seventeenth. Already, earlier in the eighteenth century, the advance of Peter the Great s forces into areas populated by Jews (no more than thinly, be it said) was not accompanied by the horrors that his predecessors had set as virtually the norm, although by and large the principle that Russia should beJudenfrei was still carefully adhered to. On the other hand there could be no question offollowing the example set by Joseph II of Austria, still less—after the third and last of the eighteenth-century Polish parti­ tions in 1795—that of revolutionary France. The old precedents con­ cerning the Jews continued to exert a sort of moral force which was not unconnected with the fact that all in Russia at this time hinged on St Petersburg’s absolute refusal to relax the autocratic system itself. In the event, the initial approach of the Russian administration to the Jews they encountered in the new western territories was, by contemporary Rus­ sian standards, liberal. It was proclaimed upon the entry ofRussian troops into Byelorussia in 1772, that all such rights and privileges—property rights and freedom of religious worship among them—as her new sub­ jects had possessed under Polish rule would be preserved under the empress’s new rule. And the Jews, remarkably, were specifically, if some­ what apologetically, included in the sweep of Catherine’s benevolence in the generous language and civilized terms which the ‘enlightened despots’ of the age had made their own throughout Europe. ‘Her Imper­ ial Majesty’s love of her fellow men [chelovekolyubie]’ did not permit her to exclude the Jews from the favour with which she treated all her sub­ jects, provided they, for their part, were loyal, obedient, and engaged in occupations that were appropriate to their status (zvanie).6' What ensued, however, was a long period of ambivalence. In 1785 and again in 1795 (on the occasion of the Third Partition) the principle that Jewish town-dwellers and merchants were entitled to treatment on an equal footing with all other town-dwellers and merchants was 59 In 1563, on the arrival of his army at Polotsk on the river Dvina, Ivan ordered the forcible conversion of the town’sjews. Those who refused to apostatize were put to death. 60 At the conquest of Mogilev and Smolensk in 1654. See especially Ettinger, ‘Medinat moskva’, 141-2. 61 N. D. Gradovsky, Torgoviye i drugiyaprava evreev v rossii (St Petersburg, 1885), 45-6.

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authoritatively restated. Allowance was even made for Jews of the appro­ priate class to serve as electors to municipal office and to be elected them­ selves. But precisely what social class or classes Jews should be permitted to belong to was (and would remain) a vexed question. Clearly, they were not peasants (krestyaniny). They were certainly not serfs (krepostnye). They were not of the gentry (dvoryanstvo). They might be merchants (kuptsy), but membership of the guilds of merchants, especially the higher guilds, was a costly affair and few Jews were of the requisite wealth and standing to join them; and, in any event, such membership entailed rights to which the ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ people (korennoye naseleniye), namely the ethnic Russian (and of course the Polish) merchants, objected. That left the class of town-dwellers (meshchantsvo); but the fact was that the great majority of the Jews of Russia and Poland at this point were not town-dwellers. They lived in, and were very much a people of, the coun­ tryside: on the large, Polish-owned estates whose masters they served directly and indirectly as leaseholders, bailiffs, rent-collectors, suppliers, and general factotums; as inn-, tavern-, and shop-keepers; as millers and distillers ofalcohol from surplus grain; and as cobblers, tailors, carpenters, and members of other, similar crafts. Most typically, they inhabited their own little hamlets, the shtetls, which were in every economic and social sense a well-established feature of the Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and Polish countryside and formed a distinct, but none the less integral segment of the overall socio-economic and socio-political structure intermediate between the peasants and the landowners who ruled them. In sum, it cannot be overly stressed that, while the Jews (with rare exceptions) had long been deprived of the privilege of ownership of land on their own account, they had, on the other hand, escaped enslavement as serfs; and that in an almost exclusively agricultural economy their established function was to provide the other classes, the one situated above them no less than the other situated beneath them, with the com­ mercial and artisanal services the gentry were unwilling and the peasants unable to provide for themselves. The Jews’ only real economic com­ petitors were therefore the genuine, at this stage overwhelmingly nonJewish, town and city folk. So long as they kept to the countryside, where they had the backing of the gentry and the nobility in return for the ser­ vices they performed and ventured into the larger commercial world in which the city merchants were dominant only sporadically or even exceptionally, a balance of sorts between them and Russia’s and Poland’s urban and commercial classes could be maintained. But it had been evi­ dent when the idea of their political, and by extension economic, eman­ cipation was brought up for consideration on the occasion of the Quadrennial Sejm, that this balance was becoming difficult to maintain by reason of the resistance of the Polish burghers to any and every sign of jews—even in quite small numbers—breaking out of the territorial and

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functional limits in which they had long been locked. When it turned out that among the new, Russian provincial governors there were some who thought it proper to insist on the new non-discriminatory rules being observed to the letter, matters became urgent in the eyes of the Polish merchant, the indigenous merchants of ‘inner* Russia following closely in the Polish wake.62 They became more urgent still when what would take shape as one of the major purposes of overall Russian policy towards the Jews was revealed: the desire of the Autocracy to remove the Jews from the countryside—altogether, if that were possible. The idea was radically to reduce, preferably to eliminate, what was taken to be the moral and economic harm Jews were considered to be inflicting on the truly indigenous population, the ignorant, unthinking, Christian, essen­ tially innocent peasant people who, of all classes of the empire, were most in need of the Tsar’s benevolent protection. It cannot be said of any of the states of Europe (apart from the lands still ruled by the Ottomans and in a narrow, formal sense, and then very brieflyjacobin France) that they were other than Christian. But nor, apart from the special case of the States of the Church in pre-Risorgbnento Italy, can it be said that in any of them the Church, regardless of denomination and however influential it might be, was other than subordinate ultim­ ately to the temporal power. This was certainly the case in Russia where the Church had not only long been the political captive of the state to a degree unknown in the west, but had long since resigned itself to that condition. There were differences, however, between Russia and the other European states not only in the political relationship between state and Church, but in respect of the place of religion generally and what were taken to be the teachings of religion on what were unquestionably the state’s affairs. It was not merely that in principle Russia continued to be held by its Autocrat and his minions to be a Christian state with a par­ ticular duty to uphold its own Orthodox Church. It was that, far from the matter of the state’s specifically Christian duty slowly wasting away, as in the west, it continued actively to exercise the minds of Russia’s rulers as one of the central criteria by which questions of public policy were to be judged and decided. The continuous search for an effective definition of the role, quality, and ultimate purposes of the Autocracy itself was an enterprise which, considering the energy and seriousness with which it was pursued, sufficed in itself to distinguish Russia from its contem­ poraries. The programmes to which the state was committed and all its structures were under obligation to promote varied somewhat over time. But in no instance was there serious deviation from the rule that Russian Orthodoxy was and needed to remain a central and indispensable 62 See for example the 1790 memorandum on the subject by Count A. R. Vorontsov, President ofthe Commercial Collegium Council, in Istoricheskii arkhiv, 6 (1993), 197-200.

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component of the ruling ethos. Nineteenth-century imperial Russia was therefore an ideological state in a manner and to a degree that had become so rare as to be virtually unknown in Europe and would not be familiar again for at least a century. And the fact that its ideology was among other things distinctly and very strongly Christian—and Chris­ tian in a mode that was substantially less tolerant and theologically sophis­ ticated than almost any of the other major European branches of Christendom—necessarily carried with it direct and unfortunate conse­ quences for the country’s Jews. That, and one other central pillar of what was in the process of becoming the states programme: nationality. This was not a simple matter of recognizing the Russian nation as the largest of the many ethnic groups inhabiting the empire to which, therefore, it was obligatory to pay special attention and with which the Autocracy would be naturally inclined to associate itself and build upon as one of the foundations of the state. It was a conception of the Russians as a people uniquely possessed of the very highest moral, spiritual, and social qual­ ities; and of the Russian nation alone being legitimately and indissolubly congruent with the state. It was therefore the one into which all the Tsar’s subjects were properly encouraged—if not actually forced—to assimilate. It would not be until the reign of Nicholas I (1825-55) that these threads of belief and ideology would, as we shall see, be clearly formulated and a deliberate effort made to move the state and its inhabitants in the requis­ ite direction. But their roots were detectable much earlier—much, indeed, as their fruit would be evident long afterwards. While, as is the nature of such things, formally established policy crys­ tallized slowly and somewhat unsteadily, measures that with hindsight can be seen as indicating the underlying thrust of official Russian think­ ing on questions relating to the Jews were enacted virtually from the first. Among them were a series of frankly discriminatory measures in the spheres of taxation and the occupations and trades in which Jews might continue to engage; listing the parts of Russia in which Jews were not to enjoy such rights as, initially, they had been said to possess; a considerable and continuing effort to deprive them of their long-standing right to dis­ til alcohol and trade in it—with calamitous consequences for the many individuals concerned; and an imperial edict that laid down the rule that Jews were forbidden to register as merchants in the towns of ‘inner Russia’, or in Russia’s port cities, although in White Russia, exceptionally, they might have the benefit of the rights of citizens by special authorization— a privilege that was extended later to Yekaterinoslav and the Crimea. These measures and others like them were handed down ad hoc, in no particular order, and fairly quickly, before the century had ended. They were not as yet components of a considered scheme. In some cases, they were dictated by no more than immediate administrative and fiscal con­ venience. In others, they were responses to protest and pressure by rapidly

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organized groups of merchants in ‘inner Russia’ who were sure that they had much to fear from the commercial competition Jews were likely to offer them if ever given a chance to do so; and by Poles of the noble and gentry classes who were soon adept at instilling their own settled views, hatreds, and jealousies in the minds of their new rulers—partly out of conviction, partly by way of advancing their own economic interests, but as a way too of laying responsibility for the misery, poverty, and drunken­ ness of their own peasantry on the shoulders of others.63 To such factors as these there must be added the government’s own separate search for a means of shunting potential settlers into the sparsely populated new Russian territories to the south and east: Jews, an eminently landless people, were rated by unthinking officials as likely candidates for the task. But it is probable that the reversal of the initial promise of equal or near­ equal treatment owed something too to St Petersburg’s mounting desire to rid itself of its own confusion of mind as it took stock of the sheer demographic magnitude and the real, which is to say ineradicably alien socio-economic, character of that great segment of Polish (and, indeed, European) Jewry it had unwittingly incorporated into its dominions. The element of shock in the response of the Tsarina’s officials to what confronted them is, indeed, unmistakable. So was their instinct to explain what struck them as impossibly foreign and unreasonably resistant to incorporation into the Russian scheme of things as being rooted in back­ wardness and immorality. The probability is that, native prejudice apart, they tended very strongly to accept, virtually without question, what they were told about the Jews by members of the one class with which they were likely to have more than mere administrative contact: the Polish gentry. True, the Jews did not drink to excess, the first Russian governor of Mogilev province, reported, but they are lazy, inclined to deceive, sleepy, superstitious, unclean, and poorly housed; they are all new arrivals [in the province], and they multiply where gov­ ernment is weak and law and justice are not enforced. They live by fraud and off the fruit of the labour of the peasants; they live on the credit extended to them by local and foreign residents; they are in debt to whomever they can borrow from; and they end by going into fraudulent bankruptcy.64

Mogilev had fallen to Russia under the terms of the First Partition of Poland (1772). By Russian calculation,65 the Jewish population incorporated into the empire at that point was of the order of 30,000. On the com­ pletion of the Third Partition (1795) the total Jewish population the 63 Shmu’el Ettinger, ‘Ha-yesodot ve-ha-megamot be-‘izuv mediniyuto shel hashilton ha-rusi klapei ha-yehudim fim halukat polin’, He-'Avar, 19 (1972), 7-10. 6:* Memorandum by Mikhail Kokhovsky, in ‘Le-toledot ha-yehudim be-rusiya be-sof ha-me’ah ha-18 (shalosh te'udot)’, He-'Avar, 19 (1972), 74-8. 65 Ibid. 78.

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Autocracy had to deal with was at least ten times that number and may have been as high as 400,000.66 But if there was a sense growing in Rus­ sian officialdom that something needed to be done about these people, there was also a suspicion that the regime might never be able to work its will on the Jews except at a cost in time, effort, resources, and reputation that would be beyond what it was disposed—and perhaps even able—to pay. All that was certain was that no Russian government would find it in its heart to leave them alone.

VII

The first serious moves towards a comprehensive approach by the Rus­ sian regime to the multiple problems it considered its Jewish subjects to have forced upon it were taken by a handful of especially strong-minded, totally loyal, senior servants of the Autocracy itself. These were men of much the same culture and cast of mind, and in some cases of the same social and ethnic background, as their analogues in the higher reaches of the Austrian and Prussian bureaucracies. In common with the Austrians and the Prussians they too viewed the Jews as a people sunk in a state of social and spiritual disorder from which they needed to be redeemed. It was only when the common people ofJewry had been protected from the fallacious teachings and the material exploitation with which their betters in Jewry itself oppressed them that there would be a prospect of rendering them useful to the state. The Russian contribution to this simple doctrine was, indeed, to emphasize the role of the state. Far-reaching reform was indispensable, it was argued by the governor of Lithuania, I. G. Frizel (or Friesel); but if anything of value was to be achieved it would be by an enterprise that the state itself directed. Lithuania was a province very heavily populated by Jews and Governor Frizel was a man of great energy who had acquired decided, if not particularly accurate, views on the state of contemporary Russo-Polish Jewry, not excluding the theological and social divisions dividing it. He was noted too for his fierce dislike of the kahal, the communal governing body, which he charged, not without cause, with keeping the poorer classes ofJews in thrall. But his great object was less the reform of Jewish practices and institutions than the bringing of the Jews in their entirety into line with the Christian subjects of the Tsar. It was to this end that he wanted the autonomous Jewish school system revamped and the Jews redirected to the land and, generally, to harder, heavier, but supposedly more salubrious (morally speaking) trades and crafts—blacksmithing, for example, rather 66 John D. Klier, Russia Gathers herJews: The Origins of theJewish Question in Russia (De Kalb, IL., 1986), 55-6.

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than tailoring. He proposed that the practice of early marriage be ended and the autonomous Jewish judicial system sharply restricted in its authority. And like all administrators who found the standing difficulty of placing the Jews in any of the recognized social classes a permanent irritant, he wished to place them in three specially established Jewish classes: merchants, craftsmen, and free peasants.67 It was Frizel’s belief, too, that at the heart of the trouble lay the Jews’ religion, more precisely, perhaps, the encrustations in which its original and not unworthy simplicities had come to be enveloped over many centuries. One way or another it too needed to be dealt with. Frizel’s ideas were therefore harsh. They spoke too of exaggerated confidence in the ability of a govern­ ment—the Russian or any other—to implement so ambitious a pro­ gramme of social engineering. But there may be detected in his views and in those of some of his colleagues and epigoni a certain benevolence too, at least so far as the common people of Jewry were concerned. Certainly, he does not seem to have doubted that, with firmness all round, something could be made of them after all. He did not think their case hopeless. Nor did he think them depraved.68 The next, and much more influential Russian official to pronounce on the problem of the Jewish presence in Russia, Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816), did see them as depraved. Sent to Byelorussia in June 1799 and then again in April 1800 to investigate the famine that had afflicted the province and the causes of the poverty and misery of the peasants generally, Derzhavin went well beyond his original remit. Rather than touching on the fundamental matters of serfdom or the agrarian regime as such, or the role and responsibility ofthe gentry for the condition of their peasants, he took up the matter of the Jews. It was the easier course, the more so as others before him had held the Jews responsible both for the peasants’ hunger and for their endemic drunken­ ness. Some scholars have detected a deep, a priori hostility to Judaism and Jewry in Derzhavin’s outlook. What is not in question is that he knew next to nothing about either before making his two brief visits to Byelorussia. Elements of traditional Christian thinking on the subject are certainly prominent in his thinking. For the rest, he appears to have relied on existing official reports, on what he had been told by members of the local nobility and gentry, much of it hearsay spiced with malignant and ignorant gossip, and on ideas he had gleaned from one or two maverick Jewish critics of the internal Jewish scene whom he had chanced to come across.69 There is no evidence that he sought out anyone of genuine standing and authority in the relevant Jewish communities to hear what The Jews, having never been enserfed, were rated a ‘free people’ (vol'niye liudi). 68 Ettinger,‘Ha-yesodot’, 11. 69 Among them Nota Kh. Notkin.

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they might have to tell him. But, in any case, what he lacked in know­ ledge of his subject he made up for in personal status. Frizel had been a hard-working, journeyman-official, fated to be lost to sight upon the assassination of his master, Tsar Paul, and the (dubious) accession to the throne of his son, Alexander I. Derzhavin was a man of parts, a pillar of the Russian establishment, and a poet of genuine distinction. He had served the state as a provincial governor. He was a member of the Senate. For a time he was Tsar Alexanders minister of justice. His views received—and by virtue of his standing still deserve—attention. The gist of Derzhavin’s view of the Jews, as submitted to the Tsar in a long, formal ‘Opinion’ (Mnenie)™ was that almost everything about them was deplorable. They were hopelessly corrupt and corrupting and very badly in need of correction and surveillance. It was necessary too, so far as possible, to keep them apart from the indigenous, Christian subjects of the empire—most urgently of all from the commendably God­ fearing, hard-working, essentially innocent Russian peasant-serfs. Some or all of this had been said before. Derzhavin himself referred approvingly to the views of the sometime governor of Mogilev, Kokhovsky, when, like his predecessor, he pronounced the Jews an indolent and deceitful people, liable to criminal association and to counterfeiting, whose presence and activities led directly to the demoralization, impoverishment, and criminalization of the peasantry. It was, indeed, because the Jews had bought up the crops to distil alcohol, therefore raising the price of bread beyond the peasants’ means, that the peasants of Byelorussia had starved. Where Derzhavin was more daring and original than Frizel or any of the others was in the plan of action which he outlined for the Tsar’s attention, a scheme of breathtaking sweep, comprehensiveness, and inhumanity. He envisaged the reform of virtually every aspect ofJewish life, public and private. The Jews would retain their freedom to profess their religious beliefs. But other promises and guarantees made to them were to be withdrawn. All Jews in the Tsar’s domains were to be counted, supplied with surnames, and divided up into four, specifically and exclusively Jewish classes or estates: merchants, artisans, farmers, and labourers. Mer­ chants and a certain category of artisans would, under certain conditions, retain their existing rights to urban residence. Exceptionally, a limited number of lesser folk would be allowed to remain in the Byelorussian countryside, although on terms amounting to the condition of inden­ tured labourers, care being taken, moreover, to separate them physically, street by street, from their Christian neighbours. But the rest, the over­ whelming majority, would either have to move to the new Russian ter­ ritories as agricultural settlers or leave Russia entirely. The kahàl was to be 70 Mnenie ob otvrashchenii p Belorussii goloda i ustroistve byita evreev, in Ya. Grot (ed.), Sochineniya Derzhavina (St Petersburg, 1878), vii. 274—355.

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abolished on the grounds that it usurped functions that belonged prop­ erly to the government and served to reinforce and perpetuate the isol­ ation of the Jews. Like Frizel, Derzhavin regarded it as the instrument whereby the elders of the Jews controlled and exploited the commonalty and the rabbis were enabled to maintain their people in a state of credulity, fanaticism, and backwardness. Why the good Lord had put this ‘dangerous* (opasnyi) people on the face of the earth was a puzzle to him, he wrote. But, if they had to be ‘suf­ fered’ (terpet'), it was necessary to make them useful—useful to them­ selves, but useful to the societies in which they were embedded as well.71 To that end, and in the interests of improved governance and social con­ trol generally, he wanted Russian Jewry, once the essential changes had been pushed through, to be reorganized on an entirely new, country­ wide basis. They were to be ruled by a non-Jewish procurator who would be advised (but no more) by a Jewish Sanhedrin. The procurator alone would bear responsibility for the Jews’ welfare and the right to represent his wards vis-à-vis the authorities, the Jews themselves losing the privilege of direct petition to, and negotiation with, the central or provincial authorities on their own behalf. A sort ofJewish protectorate would thus be formed, its advantage to the state lying in its possibilities: the revamp­ ing of the Jewish school system, for example; the provision that while Jewish religious teaching would still be allowed it would be systematically offset by the rabbis themselves having to offer their pupils unprejudiced accounts of other religions as well. Similarly, Jewish books, religious and secular, could be made subject to rigorous censorship and, the import­ ation ofJewish religious books from abroad being prohibited totally, a carefully supervised, special Jewish publishing house could be established to fill the gap. Derzhavin envisaged proper and punctual private and pub­ lic behaviour being sedulously inculcated into the entire Jewish popula­ tion by subjecting them and their homes to regular inspection. They would, of course, be required to abandon their traditional style of cloth­ ing and to dress according ‘to their station and calling’ instead, although rabbis, in application of the same logic, would be entitled to clothe themselves as before. Only members of the procurator’s Sanhedrin would, when in St Petersburg, be required to wear ‘German-style frock coats’.72 Derzhavin’s aim, in sum, was the complete and irreversible social and economic transmogrification of the Jews, a purpose to which their re­ deployment within the territories of the empire was, it seems, no more 71 Mnenie, 277. 72, Mnenie, passim. S. Dubnov, ‘Sudby evreev Rossii v epokhu zapadnoi “pervoi emansipatsii” (1789-1815)’, Evreiskaya Starina, 5 (St Petersburg, 1912), 3-25, 113-43; and Arnold Springer, ‘Gavriil Derzhavin’s Jewish Reform Project of 1800’, CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies, 10,1 (1976), 1-23.

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than of secondary interest to him. In its inner spirit his plan had some­ thing in common therefore with that of the Josephine Toleranzpatent. It also had it in common with the Austrian measures of reform that it was not immediate results that were seriously to be expected, but rather, over several generarions, a sea-change of an essentially cultural kind. Again, Eke the Austrians and the Prussians, Derzhavin (and his epigoni) sought always to distinguish useful Jews from others and to find a means of har­ nessing the immediately useful and the potentially useful to the purposes of the state. Where he differed from them, from the Prussians particularly, was in his being less intent on the expulsion of undesirables and in the confidence with which he envisaged the social and moral re-education of Russia’s Jews. But then his blueprint reEed on a totally new form of gov­ ernance being imposed on them, one that would provide, as none ever had before, for a degree of social control that was not far short of total. Derzhavin’s ‘opinion’ was submitted to the Senate in December 1800. But it was not until November 1802, under the new Emperor Alexander, that it was acted upon. A special committee of inquiry entitled Commit­ tee on the Improvement of the Jews (Komitet o blagoustroistve evreev) was formed to look into the entire question of the status of the Jews and the regulation—and regularizing—of their lives within the lands of the Autocracy. Derzhavin’s report and proposals were among the materials put before it. So it seems was a separate, very much shorter memorandum composed by N. P. Rumyantsev, minister of commerce at the time, later to be minister for foreign affairs. Rumyantsev’s ideas were not especially original, but the intention to be reaEstic before all else was evident. His point ofdeparture was the obvious ifrarely stated one that the twin poEcies of keeping the Jews out of Russia and Russian life and allowing them, at the same time, to participate in the commercial life of the country were mutuaUy contradictory. To resolve the contradiction, it was necessary to look at the condition of the Jews directly and consider what needed to be done about them. One could only go so far. Care should certainly be taken to avoid the sort of embarrassment the British government had had to face in 1753.73 But consideration should be given too to the possibility of borrowing something from the ‘prudent regulations [of blagorazumnykhpravil]' ofJoseph II. The Jews’ ‘vile [gnusnoe]’ commercial practices should be suppressed. But the main thing was positive action to move them into useful occupations, agriculture especiaUy. If that was done successfuUy, then, aU appropriate precautionary measures being taken, it would be reasonable to allow them to live in all parts of Russia. On the other hand, until that was the case, namely until they had changed their ways, they would have to remain under the existing special regime and the laws prohibiting their entry into inner Russia maintained—although 73 A reference to the Pelham government’s abortive ‘Jew Bill’. See above, pp. 38 f.

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again, that said, the Jews were nevertheless to be treated fairly, as the laws of the empire prescribed.74 The Committee on the Improvement of the Jews itself was of a high level. The minister of the interior, V. P. Kochubey, presided. Derzhavin, now the recognized authority on the subject in high places, and M. M. Speransky, the rising star among the new Tsar Alexander’s advisers, were members. So were two Polish noblemen of the first rank, Adam Czartoryski75 and Seweryn Potocki. Despite the cumulative influence of such men on the spot as Frizel and the other governors of the western terri­ tories, not to speak of that of Derzhavin himself, everything suggests that its members were expected to have views of their own. And this indeed proved to be the case. In the Committee’s minutes (for 20 September 1803) there were recorded, for example, the remarkable observations that ‘reforms brought about by the state are, as a rule, unstable [preobrazovaniya proizvodimyya vlastiyupravitel'stva, voobshche neprochny]' and that it was best to ‘guide’ the Jews to ‘perfection [fe sovershenstvu]' from a certain distance. It was therefore better to remove those obstacles that were likely to divert the Jews from following the course the state wished them to travel, rather than to seek to shunt them along it by force. Generally, it was thought that in the case of the Jews compulsion was to be avoided. The most effica­ cious of operative principles, the Committee believed, was that there should be as few prohibitions and as much liberty as possible (skol ' mozhno menshe zapreshchenii, skol' mozhno bol'she svobody). These, after all, were no more than the elements of every social order. What was really needed in dealing with the Jews was ‘quiet encouragement’. It was this that would serve the interests of the state best.76 All this was far removed from Derzhavin’s mnenie. The tone in which the Committee’s final paper was written was equally mild, which may have had something to do with the fact that Derzhavin himself had retired from the Committee before its work was completed and that it was Speransky who was in the ascendant. The religious fer­ ocity that had informed Derzhavin’s original report (his assertion that the Jews, as the enemies of Christianity, deserved punishment, for example) was absent, as was the idea of subjecting Russo-Polish Jewry to a wholly restructured internal hierarchy of the Autocracy’s own design. On the

74 N. P. Rumyantsev, ‘Evrei’, in D. E. Feldman (ed.), ‘Trebuyutsya spravedlivye ogranicheniya’, Istoricheskii Arkhiv, 5 (1994), 205-8. 75 Fourteen years earlier, at the age of 18, Czartoryski had been a pupil of Scipione Piattoli (W. H. Zawadzki, ‘Prince Adam Czartoryski and Napoleonic France, 1801-1805: A Study in Political Attitudes’, Historical Journal, 18, 2 (1975), 257 n. 75). How far the Polish prince’s contribution to the St Petersburg committee was governed by what (if any­ thing) Piattoli had taught him is of course a matter for speculation alone. 76 Dubnov, ‘Sudby evreev’, 18-22; Yu. I. Gessen, Evrei v Rossii (St Petersburg, 1906), i. 75-6.

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other hand, in much of its substance and in the general thrust of the working philosophy on which it was based, the Committee’s completed report, submitted to Tsar Alexander in October 1804, displayed some­ thing of Derzhavin’s imprint after all—which, when all is said and done, was itself no more than a close reflection of the political principles on which the Autocracy always and ultimately relied. A high degree ofcom­ pulsion was to be the order of the day, despite what had been said in the course of discussion. The Jews were to be subject to re-education and ‘improvement’, like it or not. They were to cease to employ Hebrew in their documents. And, most tellingly, they were to be removed bodily and forcibly from the countryside and an effort made to resettle them elsewhere in large numbers. Just how far the terms of the final recom­ mendations were determined by the Committee’s desire to ensure a good reception on their submission to the Autocrat, or actually anticipate his wishes, is unclear. It remains, that the Committee’s recommendations proved acceptable to him and that appropriate regulations were promul­ gated as a Statute for the Jews Polozhenie dlya evreev on 9 December 1804.77 Looking both back and forward in time, the Statute for the Jews was, in its way, a remarkable document. Much attention (no less than eight of the fifty-four clauses) was paid to the prominence of the Jews both in the distilling industry and in the retailing of spirits to the peasantry in the thousands of tiny taverns in what had once been Polish domains. Every­ thing was to be done to eliminate them. This, of course, was a perennial issue and to be expected: Frizel, Derzhavin, and virtually all the other observers and would-be social engineers who had applied their minds to the newly annexed territories before and after the promulgation of the Statute, had duly commented on the endemic drunkenness of the peas­ antry and on the prominence of Jews in the trade. All had then gone on to link the latter to the former as cause and effect. That Jews were no more than lessors ofthe nobility’s established monopoly of the right to dis­ til alcohol and trade in it and that there was no reason to suppose that if the Jews were eliminated from the chain others would not take their place were aspects ofthe problem that were, as usual, ignored. The absurd thesis that to remove the Jews was to cure the peasants continued to be relied upon, at least notionally: how seriously it was ever really taken by people in the field there is no way of knowing. But in any event, severe penalties, up to and including penal servitude for life in Siberia, were provided in case of violation of the new regulations. There was to be no relaxation of the ancient rule that Jews (negligible exceptions apart) were to be prevented from penetrating into ‘inner Russia’. Provision was made 77 Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiskoi imperii, xxviii ([St Petersburg], 1830), No. 21547, 731-7.

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for an eventual, but determined, attack on the rabbinate’s ancient—but in the government’s view presumptuous and unacceptable—practice of adjudicating cases that went beyond the strict limits of the religious (as opposed to the civil and criminal) domain, but also on rabbinical independence and authority generally. Somewhat in the spirit, although far from the actual letter, of Derzhavin’s recommendations, vastly closer official supervision of the rabbis was to be instituted. Procedures for appointment to rabbinical office and rules governing the emoluments to which rabbis might (or, in the official view, might not) be entided were to be laid down. Finally, in the general interests of administrative order and convenience Jews were to assume surnames; and No Jew, in any part ofRussia whatsoever, shall be tolerated so long as he remains unregistered in any one of the established... classes. Jews who fail to provide [on demand, for inspection] an appropriate certificate, written and issued in due form, will be treated with all the severity of the law as vagrants. (Clause 30)

But the Jews themselves could take some comfort in it being expressly stated that there was to be no question of forcible conversion to Chris­ tianity; that they were not to be oppressed or harassed in the observance of their faith and in their general social activities; that the private property of the Jews remained inviolable; and that Jews were not to be exploited or enserfed. They were, on the contrary, to enjoy the same, presumably full protection of the law that wa$ accorded other subjects of the realm. They were not to be subject to the legal jurisdiction of the landowners on whose estates they might happen to be resident. And they were to be encouraged in every way the Committee could imagine—by fiscal and other economic incentives, for example, by the grant of land and loans to develop it, by permission to move to the New Russian Territories in the south—to undergo decisive and (so it was presumed) irreversible change in the two central respects which both Frizel and Derzhavin had indeed, and perfectly reasonably, regarded as vital: education and employment. In this they were to be encouraged very strongly; but they were not to be forced. In regard to their principal concern, the authors of the Statute were generally confident, optimistic, and, all things considered, not wholly illiberal. This, as in the case ofJoseph of Austria’s Toleranzpatent of 1782, was education. The first three of the Statute’s fifty-four clauses laid down that all Jewish young people were to be entided to admission to all elementary schools, high schools, and universities in Russia on an equal basis with all other young people; that under no circumstances was advantage to be taken of their presence in Russian schools to procure their apostasy; that they were not to be compelled to study matters that were contrary to, or even merely incompatible with, their religion; and, surprisingly (considering the constant harping on the supposedly unat­

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tractive, insalubrious, and generally anomalous and hateful style in which Jews were held to be generally dressed), children in elementary schools might continue to wear their ‘Jewish clothing [plat'e evreiskoe]'. Only those attending high school would be obliged to wear German or Polish dress—‘in the interests of uniformity and good manners [dlya edinobraziya i blagopristoinosti]’,78 The consequences of these provisions would be slow to mature. But eventually they would prove, much as the Tsar’s Committee on the Improvement of the Jews had hoped, of capital importance. Of more immediate concern were the provisions setting down the means by which the Jews were to earn their living, the role they were to play in the economy, the linked matters of their civil status and, especially, the territories in which they would be at liberty to reside. The Jews were indeed to be divided into four classes: farmers (free, it was emphasized, not enserfed), artisans, merchants, and miscellaneous city-dwellers. In certain stated provinces Jewish agriculturists would be entitled both to purchase land or lease it and to hire labour to help them work it. Gov­ ernment land (up to 30,000 desyatiny79 in the first instance) would be set aside for them in the new territories. Loans would be available to those who were unable to raise the purchase money or afford the initial costs of settlement and there would be an extended release from taxation. Those taking up agriculture within the existing areas ofJewish settlement would be relieved of the customary double taxation. Jewish entrepreneurs mov­ ing into industries favoured by the state would enjoy similar financial and fiscal encouragement. All crafts not specifically forbidden them by law would now to be open to Jewish artisans. And finally, Jewish industrial­ ists, artisans, and merchants would be allowed to travel to the ‘inner provinces and even to the capital cities’8081 at any rate on a temporary basis, on their legitimate business, or for training, or for demonstration of their skills and achievements, provided they had the authorization of the provincial governors concerned who, in turn, were required to report to the minister of the interior on the grant of such travel documents on a monthly basis. Such Jews, [it was laid down] on arriving [in inner Russia] for brief periods, would, however, be under an obligation to wear German clothing, as would their wives and children, so as not to differ from others. Should they wear their own [traditional Jewish] clothing, they were not to be tolerated at all and were immediately to be expelled by the police.8' 78 The obligation to wear ‘Russian’ or ‘German’ or ‘Polish’ clothing applied to certain categories of adult Jews as well, for example, as to those who had been elected to municipal office. 79 Roughly 81,000 acres or 328 sq. kilometres. 80 i.e. St Petersburg and Moscow. 81 Clause 28.

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However, the Statute of 1804, the Jewish constitution, as some called it, was never fully implemented. The will to do so was not lacking. It was rather that in the course of the decade that followed other, greater mat­ ters (the Napoleonic wars among them) supervened and attitudes to the Jews—and to what they might feel about the Statute’s provisions—varied with the vicissitudes of Franco-Russian relations. Tsar Alexander’s own changes of mind about the principles appropriate to the governance of Russia as a whole had their effect as well. So did the dawning by stages within the administration itself of a somewhat deeper understanding of what might really be involved in a scheme to transplant very substantial numbers ofjews from the western provinces to the new territories, what its cost to the Treasury might amount to, and what social consequences were likely to flow from it if its aims were ever actually achieved. Did the Tsar and his ministers and advisers really want to facilitate the entry of the Jews into the Russian body politic even in the attenuated, not to say ster­ ilized, manner the Statute envisaged? And finally and in the event deci­ sively, there was the government’s recognition that the first and perhaps only sure result of a determined effort to effect the changes in Jewry that it held to be desirable would be the irreversible pauperization and embit­ terment of a vast, admittedly unwanted, but hitherto politically harmless population. A generation would pass before a tougher, somewhat more carefully thought-out, by intention more radical, and in practice very much harsher set of measures for the regularization of the lives of the emperor’s Jewish subjects would be drawn up and a really powerful attempt to implement them made. In the interim, certain important formal prece­ dents had none the less been established, ideas had crystallized, approaches frozen, and a series of minor moves of an openly restrictive kind launched on the ground—to be only very marginally mitigated by occasional flurries of good intentions. Not the least of these was a sub­ stantial contribution to the rapid consolidation of what would later become the officially demarcated Pale ofJewish Settlement (Chertapostoyannoi evreiskoi osedlosti) .82 But in sum, both the broad outlines of the problem of the Jews as it would long be perceived at the pinnacle of gov­ ernment in St Petersburg and the general terms in which it was thought proper to approach it, had, by the end of Alexander I’s reign, been quite firmly established. 82 For a map of the Pale of Settlement, see below, pp. 300-1.

2 Disjunctions i

inJewry anywhere in Europe had anticipated emancipation. AD that was certain about it when it was first enacted in France and as the prospect of its enactment elsewhere began to loom, was that it augured unprecedented but also irreversible change in the structure and character of the Jewish people. From this point on, the questions on which virtuaUy everything of importance in the lives of the Jews of Europe would turn was whether, if only as a hypothesis, such change was to be welcomed or rejected; and whether the welcome—or rejection— was to be flat or qualified. Upon these issues Jews in aD parts of the con­ tinent would now begin to be deeply and, in the course of time, irreparably divided. It is useful to recaD that in France itself no Jews had gone so far as to ask for emancipation before the revolutionary summer of 1789. And those who, after July of that year, had been encouraged to do so by the revolu­ tionaries’ evident disposition to attend to the matter were all either eccentric in their persons or unrepresentative in some other way of the Jews of France in their majority: men whose place was on the social and ideological margins of their people, if not beyond. Zalkind Hourwitz (1740-1812),1 a notable example, was not a native of France at aU, but a displaced Polish Jew who had rather more in common with Shelomo Polonus of VDna2 as far as the matter of emancipation was concerned than with the common run ofJewish contemporaries in his adopted country. In France itself Hourwitz had gone very far towards breaking with his original, hugely restricted circumstances. By dint of painful self­ instruction he had acquired sufficient command of the French and German languages and the secular learning of the day to find employ­ ment in the oriental department of the Bibliothèque Royale. He had launched himself with some success in pre-revolutionary Paris as a freefloating intellectual and on the eve of the Revolution cut a minor figure in Paris as a publicist and political activist. And that he was a man of irrepressibly independent views and comportment was demonstrated ew

F

' On Hourwitz’s career, see especially Frances Malino, A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz (Oxford, 1996). 2 See above, pp. 76-7.

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impressively not only in the parallel position that he insistently claimed for himself as a self-appointed spokesman for Jewish interests, but in his being at one and the same time intensely and genuinely loyal to his people and deeply and openly critical ofJewry’s actual social arrangements and leaders. Hourwitz had first staked out a position for himself in this latter sphere by entering what was to be the celebrated essay competition launched by the Royal Society for Arts and Sciences at Metz in 1787 on the subject ‘Are there ways and means of rendering the Jews happier and more useful in France?’3 He did well, sharing the prize with the abbé Grégoire and the Protestant lawyer Adolphe Thièry. But, an altogether obscurer figure than Grégoire and totally without private means, he had to wait until the year of the Revolution itself before finding the funds to get his essay published4—a delay that must have contributed to his analysis of the Jewish condition and to his prescription for its improvement failing to leave more than a limited mark on contemporary opinion,5 and hardly any at all on posterity. But the greater weakness of his essay as a contribution to public debate was that in its general thrust Hourwitz’s ‘Apologie des Juifs’ did not, on the face of things, differ all that drastically from Grégoire’s. Both wrote as men of the Enlightenment. Both denounced society for subjecting the Jews to an intolerable system of multiple social and economic constraints. Both were critical of Jewry’s own internal regime and of the precedents and mores on which that regime relied. Most of Hourwitz’s specific recommendations—release from special, restrictive laws and regulations, admission of Jewish children to the general school system, military service (subject to safeguards for Sabbath observance), use of French for all commercial purposes, and so forth—were, when taken together, quite close to the now well-established Josephine notion of what counted as a policy and plan of‘toleration’. In sum, like Grégoire and Dohm and the rest, Hourwitz had been intent, before all else, on there being laid the groundwork from which it would in due course be possible to move the Jews forward to modernization and aggiornamento. Certainly, he voiced no demand for full and explicit civil and political emancipation, least of all in anything Eke the terms that would eventually be decreed by the National Assembly four years later. If he considered doing so, it is probable that he judged the time—two years before the Revolution—unpropitious. Besides, he thought radical legislation unnecessary. When a royal edict of toleration in favour of the Protestants was issued in November 1787, Hourwitz added a gloss to the original text of his essay, arguing that what he proposed was the ‘more 3 See above, p. 56. ■* As Apologie des Juifs en réponse à la question: Est-il des moyens de rendre les Juifs plus heureux et plus utiles en France? (Metz, 1789). 5 Although Shelomo Polonus of Vilna is known to have read an abridged version of Hourwitz’s essay.

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practicable for it being unnecessary to make new laws on the matter of the Jews and that it would suffice if His Majesty deigned to proclaim that they were included in the category of non-Catholics*.6 Yet all this said, the difference between Hourwitz and his competitors was profound. Being a Jew—one who had emerged, moreover, out of the fastnesses of the ancient Jewish Tradition itself—he was vastly better informed about Jewry in general and the actual content of traditional Jewish theology and law in particular than Dohm or Grégoire or Thiéry and their like were ever likely to be. There was, moreover, no thought in Hourwitz’s mind, as there was in Grégoire’s and Domb’s, of the liberation and modernization of the Jews leading them eventually into the Chris­ tian fold. There is no suggestion in his plan of the Jews having to undergo a form of triage: of their being divided actually or even conceptually into the privileged and the non-privileged, the useful and the useless, the native and the foreign. His subject was undifferentiated Jewry, Jewry as a whole; and it is especially when he turned inward, speaking as a Jew and with the authority of a man of substantial traditional learning himself, that he struck his most authentic, individual, and, at moments, even pas­ sionate notes. For finally at the heart of his argument lay his criticism of the Talmudic corpus and of the rabbinate whose business it was to expound it and whose social and moral authority turned, of course, on its command of the Talmud’s content and method. Hourwitz was careful to defend both Jewish learning and the rabbis themselves from the sweep­ ing, vulgar accusations commonly levelled against them by the men of the Enlightenment, Voltaire among them. But he made no bones about his view of the internal constraints to which Jews in all parts were subject through the workings of the rabbinical-Talmudic system: of the limits it set upon their worldly freedom, of the manner in which it effectively barred their entry into society on a basis of equality. The social liberation of the Jews was conditional, he believed, on the power that the rabbis and the parnassim jointly exercised over ordinary people in their daily lives being terminated—in great matters as in small. Their rabbis and syndics [i.e. parnassim] must be strictly forbidden to assume the least authority over their fellows outside the synagogue, or refuse honours to those who have shaved offtheir beards, or curled their hair, or who dress like Christians, go to the theatre, or observe other customs that bear no actual relation to their religion, but derive from superstition alone as a means ofdistinguishing them from other peoples.7 6 Apologie, 68-9, 70. 7 Ibid. 38-9. Hourwitz’s essentially irreligious approach set him apart from an other­ wise somewhat analogous figure, Menahem Mendel Lefin of Satanov, like himself a learned Polish Jew with advanced opinions in which he had been confirmed in the course of an extended stay in Berlin. Lefin strongly favoured secular learning, was intensely crit­ ical of what he took to be an obscurantist rabbinate, and was exceedingly dismissive of all that smacked of mysticism, Hasidism (a school that relied on charismatic leaders and emphasized the joys rather than the rules ofJudaism) included. But he had no doubt that

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This was an argument for which the leaders ofJewish orthodoxy in France never forgave Hourwitz, his ideological sins being compounded in their eyes by his Polish origins—of which, it needs to be said, he was far from making a secret. When, later, under the Napoleonic regime, it was proposed that he attend the Assembly ofJewish Notables a number of rabbis threatened to leave if he so much as appeared among them. And a full century and a half later, when it was proposed that his arrival in France be marked by a modest academic celebration, the most distin­ guished historian of French Jewry of the day, in an article entitled ‘Un Juif polonais en France’, took the trouble to sniff: ‘It is is not enough to come from the East to be a source of illumination.’8 The leaders of the small communities in south-west France known colloquially as ‘Portugais’ (andin pre-revolutionary official jargon as ‘les Anciens de la Nation Portugaise’) were marginal men of another kind. The ‘Portugais’ were the highly self-conscious descendants of people of converso (or crypto-Jewish) origin who had been allowed to setde in Bordeaux and Bayonne and a few other localities upon their flight from the Iberian peninsula and who had gradually and rather circumspectly returned to an open profession of their faith. But it was not their antecedents alone that distinguished them from the much more numer­ ous and, in the long term, more important communities of eastern France. As would be pointed out in the National Assembly, they were already largely free of the restrictive regulations that still bore heavily on the Alsatians and Lorrainers. They were already profoundly acculturated. And their very Judaism was selective and, in a sense, of their own devis­ ing. A contemporary noted, that The Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne, far from making the Mishna and the Talmud, like all other Jews, the fundamental basis of their discipline, reject that within it which they find contrary or inconsistent with common sense and a literal reading of the Bible on which they rely for the dogmas to which they subscribe.9

Chrétien de Malesherbes, the royal minister, instructed by the Conseil d’Etat to look into the question of the Jews just prior to the Revolution, was a staunch enough royalist, but a man of liberal views. He turned out to be sympathetic to the idea of emancipation and, unusually among European statesmen set by their masters to deal with the matter, prepared to inquire into the opinions of the Jews themselves. An informal com­ mittee of inquiry was established. A series of what seem to have been religion was the motor force of Jewry and was not to be circumvented or thrown overboard. Lefm was a protégé of Prince Czartoryski and played a small role in the abortive negotiations on a form of limited emancipation of the Jews at the time of the Four-Year Sejm. 8 Robert Anchel, ‘Un Juifpolonais en France. Zalkind Hourwitz’, Univers Israélite, 92, 38 (1936/7), 505-6. 9 Cited in Z. Szajkowski, 'Hitnagshuyot ha-ortodoxim ve-ha-reformim be-?arfat’, Horeb, 14-15 (1960), 257 n. 16.

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fairly discreet talks were held with small groups ofJewish notables, the one really formidable delegation among them being that which the Jews of Bordeaux had dispatched to Paris to represent them. There, the ‘Por­ tugais’, explained that their main concern was to ensure that they should continue to enjoy their unique condition of de facto toleration.10 Their particular and, in the circumstances, not unreasonable fear was that a for­ mal redetermination of policy on the Jews of France in their entirety, while it might carry some benefits for all, would in practice work against them. That the government was likely to demand that it be generously compensated for granting the Jews of Bordeaux liberties which, for all practical purposes, they already enjoyed worried them as well. But above all, they were desperate to keep their case apart from that of the Alsatian Jews. It was only in the following year, when the matter of full emanci­ pation for all Jews had already been raised in the new National Assembly by others, that they proceeded to demand full and formal equality of status with other Frenchmen, upon which the Assembly, in the event, as we have seen, was quick to decree their absolute emancipation, leaving the much more controversial case of the Alsatian Jews in abeyance.11 As for the Alsatian Jews themselves, they had been slower still to ask for liber­ ation. There is no evidence of their authorized representatives pressing for anything remotely of the kind before the Revolution; and when they made their own first approach to the new National Assembly it was to ask for no more than an end to the special taxes laid upon them and the abo­ lition of the residential, and travel restrictions to which they were subject. The greatest anxiety of the Alsatians was to retain their own internal communal autonomy—to which end, with only rare exceptions, they (at all events, their authorized representatives) were prepared to forgo eman­ cipation altogether. Only when they learned that other branches of French Jewry, the small community in Paris among them, were prepared to yield to the demand that they give up their ancient corporate status did the Alsatians and Lorrainers fall, reluctantly, into line.

II

None of this should have been unexpected. Jewish orthodoxy in its pris­ tine form had always been deeply conservative, profoundly interested in beating back all that signified social, cultural, and intellectual change and 10 In which plea, it may be said, they had the support of the city authorities of Bordeaux who were happy to confirm that they, for their part, saw no cause not to include the ‘Portugais’ in the newly tolerated category of‘non-Catholics’. ” For the reports of delegations sent to Paris by the Jews of Bordeaux, see Z. Szajkowski, 'Mishlafroteihem shel yehudei bordo el va'adat malzerb (1788) ve-el ha-aseifa ha-le’umit (1790)’, Zion, 18,1—2 (1953).

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diversion, immensely resistant to the idea of accommodation to altered circumstances. This is not to say that it permitted itself the intellectual and moral luxury of total withdrawal from the world around it. It was rather that the initial primary division of opinion within the communities would therefore be between those whose instinct it was to resolve on total rejection of what their political and alien masters seemed to wish of them and those who were drawn to the prospect of new opportunities despite an anxiety to retain a foothold or more in their old, closed world as they proceeded to tread with varying degrees of enthusiasm, caution, and trepidation in the unfamiliar waters of the new. The two invariable obstacles to any such halfway house, however, were the intensely alien character of the world without and the view upon which, on reflection, the primary moral and intellectual leaders of orthodoxy were to settle, namely that a halfway house of any kind was fundamentally incompatible with authentic Judaism and the survival of the Jewish people as they understood both the one and the other. On few subjects were the traditional and most authoritative leaders and spokesmen for European Jewry so circumspect as on Christianity itself and, by extension, the Christian Churches: the Roman Catholic and the Russian Orthodox before all others. In the safety of twelfth­ century Muslim Egypt Maimonides had been free to write that With regard also to ‘that certain man* [i.e. Jesus] who imagined that he would be the Messiah and was executed bÿ order of the Court, Daniel already prophesied concerning him, as it is said, ‘and the men of violence among your own people shall lift themselves up in order to fulfil the vision; but they shall fail.’ Is there then a greater failure than this? For all the prophets foretold that the Messiah would redeem Israel and deliver them and gather their exiles and strengthen their observance of the precepts. Whereas he [Jesus] caused Israel to be put to the sword, their remnant to be scattered and humiliated, the Torah to be displaced, and the greater part of the world to be misled into serving a god other than the Lord.12

No Jew in Christian Europe who ventured to reflect on the subject thought otherwise of the intrinsic validity of Christianity or of the incal­ culable injury it had caused his people. But comment of so dangerous an order would be subject to routine internal censorship. Even private, unwritten comment was dangerous if reported, doubly and trebly so if, as was always possible, it was misreported, torn out of context, or ascribed to the rabbis with deliberately injurious intent by apostates, provocateurs, and malshinim (delators). But reference to Christianity was rare for a more fundamental reason than fear. It was a central and telling fact ofJewish life and learning that neither the people nor their rabbis took much interest 12 Ha-yad ha-hazaka, ‘Hilkhot melakhim’, xi. Cited in English translation in H. H. BenSasson, ‘The Reformation in Contemporary Jewish Eyes’, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Proceedings, 4,12 (1970). Maimonides’s reference is to the Book of Daniel 11:14.

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in other religious systems perse and where any thought at all was given to Christianity specifically it was as to a religion that to a Jewish mind unfail­ ingly verged on the idolatrous. The doctrines that most obviously sep­ arated it from Judaism (the Messianic status ofJesus, the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection) were, in so far as they were known about, apt to be dismissed as rubbishy paganism. Many of the commonest of Christian practices (adoration of Saints, for example) struck Jews as pantheistic. The grounds for concluding that Christians, whether they knew it or not, indulged in the idolatrous worship of images were all around them and seemed overwhelming. This is not to say that none in Jewry, notably among the learned, ever raised his eyes from the sacred literature that was his proper object of study to observe his neighbours, nor that some of those who did were not led in due course to accord a cautious, if silent welcome to certain aspects of the Protestant Reformation, for example. The Reformation did seem to some Jews to signal a move away from those practices in the Roman Church which struck them as especially idolatrous and a mark ofprogress therefore towards somewhat more explicit reliance on what Christians termed the Old Testament. Ifit marked the beginning of a reversion to Judaism’s absolutely central prohibition on graven images,13 and perhaps to Judaism generally then, perhaps, there was some small reason to be hopeful after all: some reason—but not much, as the turn taken in the Lutheran camp especially soon demonstrated. But, in any event, the Jews’ abhorrence of Christianity, the intensely negative light in which non-Jewish society had always been regarded, and the deeply ingrained suspicion and fear in which all forms of non-Jewish authority were commonly held all went beyond the theological. The Christian world in which the Jews of the greater part of Europe were embedded struck them as barbarous and hypocritical beyond repair. Secular and clerical authorities spoke repeatedly of peace and loving kindness. Their actual conduct, so far as most Jews could see and judge for themselves, was shot through and through with violence and cruelty: thus in the Christians’ own treatment of each other, certainly so in their treatment of the Jews themselves. The lesson of Exile in Europe was that as much by sword as by word the masters of Christendom had sought to bring about if not the death of Jewry, at any rate its decimation; and that failing that, they had sought to ensure that Jews lived out their lives in the greatest possible moral and material squalor and degradation. There had been a time, to be sure, when Christian theologians were anxious to chal­ lenge the rabbis to engage in ostensibly even-handed formal debate. But such debates were never even-handed in practice. They were not debates that Jews were ever allowed to win, nor such as any possible good could ever come to them. If it appeared to authority that the churchmen, as was 13 See Ben-Sasson, ‘Reformation’, passim.

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hoped, had the better of the argument, pressure on the Jews to follow through and apostatize would intensify, perhaps insuperably. If it was the rabbis who appeared to be having the upper dialectical hand, the Chris­ tian response was likely to be vengeful and doubly devastating. Success, even so much as a demonstrably good defence of the Jewish position (there was no question ever of a direct attack on the Christian position itself), could only be a source of fleeting, private satisfaction. This the rabbis were glad to forgo. For at bottom there remained the certain knowledge that the more serious and open-minded the theological debate the greater the danger of the old spectre of Judaism as a living threat to the Church rising anew; and with it the suspicion that the Jews, or at all events their rabbis, continued to harbour secret proselytizing (socalled Judaizing) ambitions. In fact, the Jews of Christian Europe (like the Jews of the Islamic lands) had learned to shun missionary activity and, generally, high and low, were all aware of the danger of crossing or pro­ voking the gentiles in the crucially delicate realms of faith and religion. There was some satisfaction therefore in noting that in more recent times the Christian urge to confront the Jews theologically, common enough in medieval, and not unknown in Renaissance Europe, had largely faded away. Such, at all events, had been the conventional wisdom for some time. It therefore followed, by the same token, that to the learned and conventional mind in Jewry plans and proposals directed explicitly at the ordering and reordering of the Jews’ internal social affairs could not fail to be alarming in the extreme. Thus it was when the intentions ofauthor­ ity were ostensibly well-meaning, even benevolent. Doubly so, of course, when its benevolence was in doubt. The closer one’s attachment to ancient Jewish tradition and practice, the stronger would be one’s inclin­ ation to fend off such proposals; and, when the pressure to accommodate oneself to them grew, to temporize. It was true and plain that the offer of improvement in the civil status of the Jews was nowhere linked in any overt, obvious, and explicit way—in France, indeed, in any way at all— to the demand that the Jews, as private individuals, abandon their faith. Even in Russia where, once the Autocracy had made up its mind on the matter of the Jews, official thinking was to go a good deal further, there was no serious question of force being employed frankly and openly to such an end. But the hope that eventually, as the Jews entered what was, of course, a Christian society, and as they discovered the truths and beauties on which it was held to be founded, they would be drawn to it in religious terms as well was at least implicit in the measures adopted in Austria and Prussia, and in Russia all but explicit. Such, at all events, was the ultimate purpose. The teachings and terminology of the Enlighten­ ment were manifest, to be sure, almost everywhere in the details and lan­ guage of the various edicts of toleration and decrees of partial emancipation. But to the informed, thoughtful, and devout Jew this in

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itself was cold comfort. For while it might be the case that the demand that the Jews accept baptism as the price offreedom had been abandoned, the provisions ofthe various laws and edicts—to say nothing of the think­ ing that lay behind them—struck unmistakably and with deliberately injurious intent at the traditional conduct of the Jews. In Judaism, unlike Christianity, the decisive emphasis had always been on behaviour, rather than on belief. Faith and belief were of the utmost importance, but they were not ordinarily matters for discussion, least of all for regular exam­ ination. Nor, more generally, were the secular and religious realms regarded as distinguishable from each other. The lives of the Jews might not be seamless webs in practice, but the thrust of the teaching was that they should strive to make them so. It followed, therefore, that even ostensibly innocent and benevolent measures to encourage the entry of Jewish children into schools which catered to the general population and wean Jews away from the use of their own languages and script for mundane purposes signalled nothing but danger to the devout. The promise—a fortiori the threat—of state education being extended to the Jews even on a voluntary basis horrified and frightened them. What could state education of the young mean except a paving of the way to eventual de-Judaization? What could consent to the state’s assumption of responsibility for schooling signify except a reduction of the realm of the Law—whence a narrowing of rabbinical jurisdiction and rabbinical authority and a surrender of a central function of the Jewish community itself from time immemorial? The more closely those who remained wedded to the old forms and principles of Judaism considered what appeared to be on offer, the readier they were, therefore, to forgo its pre­ sumed advantages, the more so as in eastern Europe especially there were additional reasons for caution. For while the issue of emancipation was fated to remain no more than hypothetical there for very many years to come, all knew that its origins were French and revolutionary. There was some general, non-specific awareness even in Poland and the western provinces of Russia that the French bore a promise ofpolitical and, perhaps, economic liberty too in their knapsacks. And something too was known of Napoleon’s retreat from the originally unambiguous position of the French revolutionaries articulated in the decree of 1791. The sobering impact of the conjunction of these contradictory signals served to reinforce the ancient Jewish instinct to keep out of the quarrels of the gentiles so far as possible; and Jewish calm stood in sharp contrast, therefore, to the relative warmth with which some, though by no means all, ethnic Poles received those they hoped would be their deliverers. But then the prospect, followed by the brief experience, of renewed Polish rule under French patronage held little attraction for most of the Jews concerned, some scattered exceptions to the contrary, the models (or model) for the character ofjankiel, the patriotic Jewish innkeeper in

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Mickiewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz among them. The ancient argu­ ment against Jews in any way risking a quarrel with whoever held the actual power in the land could and did marginally work the other way, notably in Lithuania where members of the Polish nobility lent their sup­ port to the French and many of those Jews who were politically and eco­ nomically dependent upon their Polish masters went a good part of the way with them willy-nilly.'4 None the less, by and large, where it was necessary and politic to make a stand one way or the other and the choice was to some extent a free one, it was the Russians who had the support of the Jewish inhabitants of the domains over which they ruled or to which they laid claim. For in general, the Russian status quo had come in the course of a decade or so to be seen as preferable to the Polish status quo ante; and the Russian authorities had noted and encouraged this tendency by taking the precautionary step of issuing vague, but encouraging promises of good things to come for the Jews once the war was over and by granting minor immediate improvements—some easing of the tax burden, for example. Still, more important than any such considerations was the con­ viction held by the traditional leaders ofJewish opinion and the traditional wielders of communal authority that the Autocracy was firm at any rate in its wish to maintain the authority of the rabbis—clipped, no doubt, and subordinate to state interests, but at any rate in place, as was consistent with its insistence on organized religion of any kind as a primary instrument of social control all round. The French, in contrast, were suspected, not with­ out reason, of course, of being intent on eroding it. ‘It has been put to me,’ wrote the influential Hasidic leader, R. Shne’ur Zalman of Lyady, as the French invasion of Russia began in 1812 and all-round political change seemed for once to be in serious prospect, ‘that, if Bonaparte were victorious, happiness in Israel would increase and the dignity of the Jewish people magnified.’ But to believe that, he informed his people, would be a very gross error ofjudgement. To maintain loyalty to Russia was not only a matter of simple prudence. It was vital to Jewry itselfper se. For whereas Napoleon was godless, the Tsar was not. If the French were victorious the Jews would be stripped not merely of their worldly goods, but ofJudaism itself. The consequence of liberation would be a parting and estrangement of the hearts of the Jews from their Father in heaven. If, on the other hand, our sovereign Alexander were victorious, the poverty of Israel would [doubtless] increase, and the dignity of Israel would [as before] be downtrodden. But the hearts of the Jews would be bound and attached and joined [more strongly than ever] to their Father in heaven.'5 14 I. Bartal, ‘ “Ha-model ha-mishni”—zarfat ke-mekor hashpa'a be-tahalikhei hamodemi?aziya shel yehudei mizrah eiropa (1772-1863)’, in Y. Cohen (ed.), Ha-mahapekha ha-çârfatit ve-rishuma (Jerusalem, 1991), 276-9 and passim. 15 Cited in B. Mevorah (ed.), Napoleon u-tekufato (Jerusalem, 1968), 181-3. Cf. S. S. Deutsch, ‘Milhemet ha-ADMOR ha-zaken mul napoleon’, KefarHabad, 556,14Jan. 1993.

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How far R. Shne \ir Zalman had been rendered at one and the same time fearful of the Russians and yet drawn to them by the discovery of common concerns upon his arrest, incarceration, and interrogation some fourteen years earlier there is no knowing. But the affair of his arrest, pro­ foundly reflective ofboth the fissures in European Jewry and of the ambi­ guities of Russian-Jewish relations, must have left its mark. It had begun with an anonymous letter emanating from Vilna in May 1798 and addressed to the Tsar Paul, the writer charging Shne’ur Zalman with being a political conspirator. He was engaged, it was said, in ‘drawing up lists [of militants] with intent to assist the French Revolution* and of hav­ ing a hand in the organization of a group of idle, pleasure loving, thiev­ ing, and dissolute young Jews who had shaken off the authority of their elders and were a standing disgrace to their families. While justice clearly required that the rebbe and his followers be drafted into the ranks of the Tsar’s army and sent to the battlefield, or failing that, into distant exile, his friends and disciples and his protectors in St Petersburg itself had ensured, so it was claimed, that nothing of the kind be done. When two more such letters arrived in the capital and the Procurator-General, P. V. Lopukhin, conveyed their contents to the Tsar, Shne’ur Zalman’s arrest and investi­ gation were ordered. The Governor-General of Lithuania, Y. I. Bulgakov, was instructed to look into the affair, more particularly into the nature of the Hasidic ‘sect’ generally. The investigation revealed that the charges against Shne’ur Zalman were false, but note was taken of the fact that the view of the Hasidim taken by the more reputable Jews of Vilna was an exceedingly unfavourable one, that great efforts had been made to prevent them from establishing themselves in that city, and that some in Vilna had gone so far as to liken them, provocatively, to the Free Masons. The governor of Byelorussia, who knew rather more about Shne’ur Zalman and his people than did his colleague in Vilna, pointed out for his part that while his information was that Shne’ur Zalman’s conduct was free of corruption, that in itself only made him and his circle more dan­ gerous to the state. For under the rebbe's modest demeanour, said the gov­ ernor, there was evidence of great and fully conscious authority. His followers, totally obedient to him, were, as a group, unruly, and not eas­ ily controlled by others, if at all. ‘Much benefit and profit would accrue to Jewish society’ therefore if the Procurator-General were to recom­ mend the total abolition of this sect to the Tsar. The Procurator-General followed the governor’s advice, recommending on 16 November 1798 that the ‘sect’ be dissolved, stating, however, that there were no grounds for continuing to hold Shne ’ur Zalman himselfunder arrest. In the event, only the latter half of his recommendation was accepted, although with the proviso, by special instruction of the Tsar, that the rebbe and his people be subject thenceforward to surveillance. The ‘sect’ itself was not to be dissolved, however, and to that extent the delation may be said to

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have failed. None the less, the incident struck sensitive nerves on both sides, as may be seen from the record of Shne ur Zalman’s interrogation. QUESTION. What foreign connections do you have; with whom; and where? answer. 1 have no connection with foreign Jews except for such as are in Jerusalem and apart from those with whom the community [here] is in correspondence by means of such messengers as have been sent from there [Jerusalem], from time immemorial, to various places in Poland, Lithuania and places in Germany on the other side of the [Russian] frontier [for the collection of funds] on behalf ofjews in Jerusalem. QUESTION. Who recruited you into the secret associations [or plots], and was it long ago? answer. [I am] not involved in any secret plots or special associations. [I] only write [to the people in Jerusalem] to encourage them to pray to God—as do many others.

Closely interrogated on the difference between his ‘sect’ and other segments ofJewry, Shne ’ur Zalman was at pains to deny that his HaBaD16 following was a ‘sect’ at all or that its teachings and order ofprayer differed in any way from what was accepted and practised by ‘all Israel’. It was indeed the case, that they sang psalms and suchlike where others perhaps might not do so. But there was no question of theirs being a new religion, as the Russians had been told and as the Russians seemed to fear. Where the HaBaD Hasidim did differ from some Jews was in their insistence on purity of heart and full sincerity and intensity in prayer. His interrogators needed to understand that among the matters at issue was that of the cor­ ruption of the regular rabbinate that had occurred under Polish rule: the system whereby official sanction for a rabbi’s appointment and the grant and assumption of authority over his people were for purchase. The king of Poland, in his time, had refused to intervene or even pay adequate attention to the abuse. Such had been the state of affairs ‘until, by God’s grace and His having brought about an extension of Russian Imperial government into all Poland ... the aforementioned system of [corrupt] rabbinical rule was dissolved, especially in White Russia . . . and all die people were made free men in our land of Russia and all had the right and the possibility to pray in any way or place or company they might wish’.17 To be sure, the servility of Russian Jewry in the early years of the Tsar’s rule in the new western provinces—prayers being regularly offered up in places of public worship for his safety and well-being, for example18—has 16 The common acronym for Hokhma, Binah, Da‘at (Wisdom, Understanding, Know­ ledge) by which Shne’ur Zalman’s following, and that of his successors in the Lubawitsch line of Hasidim, have wished to be known, emphasizing their stress on intellectuality. 17 Record of interrogation and Shne’ur Zalman’s signed statement (in Hebrew) in Yehoshu‘a Mundschein (ed.), Kerem HaBaD: ‘lyun ve-Heker be-Mishnat HaBaD: Divrei Yemei ha-Hasidut ve-Darkei ha-Hasidim, iv, 1 (Kefar Habad’, 1992), 43-53. 18 For a statement of the grounds for loyalty to Russia generally and to the Tsar specif­ ically—effusive in language, but not uncharacteristic of the optimistic mood which swept

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to be seen in its context, which is to say as not much more than the exter­ nal casing in which the deeply considered position and desires of virtually all who mattered in Russo-Polish Jewry at the time customarily wrapped their primary concerns. What was presented to the public at large—admit­ tedly with a weather eye out for the authorities—was no more than what short- but also long-term considerations did seem to dictate. It was the firm view that the political liberation of the Jews on something like the French model, if ever it was to take place, would prove disastrous for Jewry as traditionally—which is to say, historically, spiritually, and, so to speak, rabbinically—conceived. Better by far further servitude to earthly rulers than disruption ofthe service Israel owed to God. If, as seemed ever more clearly to be the case, proper and wholehearted devotion to the latter was con­ ditional upon continued servile acquiescence in the former, so be it. For all these reasons, it followed that in the Tsar’s domain the question whether there was a socially and morally but, especially, a doctrinally tenable posi­ tion that fell short of absolute fidelity to the old forms and the old sources of communal authority without entailing abandonment of them would not be high on the Jewish social agenda for the time being. In central and west­ ern Europe, where the still moderate reordering of the affairs of the Jews was already precipitating autonomous processes ofinternal change, matters were otherwise. The traditionalist and orthodox party’s need to mark out a position for itselfand resolve how to defend it had become overwhelming. The established rabbinical position on conduct had always been that while egregious human appetites were not to be countenanced, they could be—and at times needed to be—understood. By and large, in the fullness of time, they could be passed over. Consider the matter of the Sabbath and the absolute, biblical injunction to keep it under all circum­ stances short of what might urgently be required to save life (and, but somewhat more doubtfully, limb). To profane the Sabbath privately, afor­ tiori publicly, was to commit an unforgivable offence that fell short, if short at all, only of intermarriage or apostasy. On the other hand, the dif­ ficulties of Sabbath observance had always been great and could now, in the new commercial and technological circumstances ofearly nineteenth­ century Europe, be expected to multiply. The question how an anxious orthodox rabbinate was to deal with its profanation was therefore urgent. Was it to take the view that profanation was not to be tolerated under any circumstances at all? Were there instances that could reasonably, even if not entirely legitimately, be passed over in disapproving silence? The prohibition on writing on the Sabbath was absolute. through much of Russian Jewry, but most powerfully among those who, by virtue of their mildly modernist tendency, might have been expected to welcome the French—see the speech delivered by one Hillel Aharon Markievich in a synagogue in Dorpat late in Aug. 1812 (two months after the crossing of the Niemen), reported in ‘Evrei v voine 1812 goda’, Evreiskaya starina, 5 (1912), 87-8.

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But might there be a way out and around it? The question arose in a case that came before the rabbinate in Germany whether, in place of a signature, it might be proper to do no more than affix one’s personal seal to a document? Would that constitute writing? A man of affairs had been called to a government office to sign and seal papers on the Sabbath. Unable either to refuse to appear or to postpone the summons he wished to employ a gentile to affix his seal for him. Would that constitute a trans­ gression? The rabbi called to pass judgement passed over the matter ofthe actual transaction of business on the Sabbath in what one supposes was diplomatic silence. An official summons to officialdom could be judged an instance offorce majeure and the relative tolerance accorded the ques­ tioner can be read, moreover, as implicit recognition of the compelling force of economic necessity and of the reluctance of rabbis, in central Europe at all events, to contribute to what might be the ruin of their parishioners or, worse, their departure from the fold entirely. But on the narrow and specific issue ofthe employment of a seal and its actual use by the gentile in the Jew’s name, the rabbi refused to budge, pleading an absence of authority for any such obvious manipulation of the Talmudic sources.19 Here therefore, by extension, was a secondary issue, duly accompanied by a large corpus of rabbinical discussion and (divided) judgement. The most ancient authorities seem to have forbidden vicari­ ous profanation altogether: the original biblical injunction applies explicitly to all within the Jew’s household regardless of ethnic or reli­ gious identity or gender or civic status or even species: therefore to male and female servants, to bondsmen and bondswomen, and to beasts of burden as well. Later authorities took the view, however, that while the Sabbath injunction did certainly apply to Jews absolutely and regardless of condition and situation, it was not applicable to gentiles per se. It was not, that is to say, in a class with the so-called Noachide Laws that posited an absolute prohibition applicable to all human kind of such major crimes as incest and the shedding of blood. On the matter of Sabbath observance by non-Jews in Jewish service, the masters ofthe Talmud were if anything somewhat ambivalent and their successors tended positively towards the pragmatic. The kindling of fire on the Sabbath was ‘labour’ and therefore, ostensibly, forbidden. But it was plain that what could be demanded of Jews inhabiting the warm lands of the Mediterranean could not as rea­ sonably be demanded of those who needed to survive a north European winter. It was conceded, for example, that it was legitimate for Jews to venture on a long sea voyage, it being obviously impossible to disembark on each Sabbath and the seamen in any case being gentiles. But was what was applicable to a journey by sea equally applicable to Jews setting out on a journey by inland waterway? 19 The case is recounted in Jacob Katz, Goy shel Shabbat (Jerusalem, 1983), 99-100.

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The biblical injunction aside, the social importance of the issue of rig­ orous observance of the Sabbath lay in the fact that in daily practice no issue arising out of the full code of 613 injunctions which it was incum­ bent upon an adult male Jew to observe cut so closely and direcdy and regularly to the bone ofJewish unity and identity. It enjoined forms of uniform private and public conduct by all; and these in a form that nec­ essarily drew the sharpest, most frequent, and most visible of behavioural distinctions between Jew and non-Jew. Where and whenJews lived apart, observance was part of the natural order of things. In the new condition of enhanced freedom within civil society, it served as a perpetual reminder ofJewish distinctiveness. The dilemma was plain. Where the rabbis and established secular leaders of the community insisted on strict observance, either on simple principle or because they explicitly valued it for its cohesive value, there they now faced the danger of being ignored or rejected. The Jewish magnates who had purchased great estates and town houses and maintained entire households which were intended from the first to be managed and worked by non-Jews tended increas­ ingly not to be troubled by halakhic (i.e. legal-behavioural) questions of any kind, the more so as the underlying purpose of the exercise on which most of them were embarked was in any case their own closer social inte­ gration into the highest society in the land. But the lesser folk who had done no more than take advantage of their new freedom to exchange old homes, trades, and occupations for new were apt to find that their new circumstances were only with difficulty compatible with rigorous obser­ vance of the halakha, and of the Sabbath in particular. Farming presented obstacles that were especially difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. But many urban trades and crafts presented great difficulties too. There were skills, along with Ecence to exercise them that could only be acquired by a process of apprenticeship to non-Jewish masters. These were likely to make demands of their own, beside catering to a clientele that expected service on Saturdays. But where the enterprise was in Jew­ ish hands and gentiles were especially employed to deal with clients on the Sabbath, there was still the awkward—and from a traditional Jewishrabbinical point of view intolerable—problem of a Jewish proprietor living over his shop while others, Jews or gentiles, worked below.20 The result, inexorably, was a slowly rising, increasingly open call for a general loosening of the chains, although, that said, it seems to have been the par­ allel, more systematic attack on religious worship and ritual itself, rather than the phenomenon of illicit and individually determined private and public non-observance, that was to strike most painfully at orthodoxy’s vital nerve. The first serious, public, and therefore especially notorious attempt to 20 Ibid. 104-5,107-22.

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institutionalize a reform of the strictly religious practices and rituals of Judaism was undertaken by an independently minded branch of the Jew­ ish community in Hamburg late in 1817. A private synagogue run on what were thought of at the time as shockingly revolutionary lines (men and women seated together, the Torah read in Sephardi Hebrew, hymns sung in the German vernacular) had been established in Berlin three years earlier by the radical Westphalian rabbi, Israel Jacobson. The organized community in Berlin limited itself to silent disapproval. It was King Fred­ erick William III and his officials who, for reasons of their own, among them their fear that a bright new form ofJudaism might prove attractive to Christians, insisted on it being closed down.21 There were no such official objections to Hamburg’s new synagogue, however, for all that the radicals’ reordering of the service was intended to cut deeper. It was to be more decorous than was usual: in effect, more like a service in a German church. The eighteen daily morning benedictions and prayers that expressed a longing for a Return to the Holy Land and for national Redemption were deleted from the service. The Sabbath service was heavily altered too and then rendered doubly scandalous by the installa­ tion of an organ and the employment of a non-Jew musician to play it. The preponderant, although not exclusive, language of prayer was Ger­ man. All in all, it was a case of dissidence that could not fail to seem to embody almost everything—outright apostasy excepted—that might excite orthodoxy’s loathing and contempt as imitative of the gentiles, dis­ loyal to the Jewish people, deeply heretical, and shamelessly public into the bargain. When the outraged Hamburg conservatives appealed to a panel comprising some of the most distinguished rabbis of the day in cen­ tral Europe the response, as anticipated, was immediate and their fero­ cious statements of condemnation were promptly gathered together and published for all to read.22 It says something about the fear and urgency with which Jewish ortho­ doxy23 at its most rigorous sought to confront the situation that this should be one of the rare occasions on which it found a leader. Moshe Sofer (1762-1839), more commonly known as ‘the Hatam Sofer’, was in most ways a prototypical member of his class of prodigious scholars which, given its ancient prestige, its continuing influence over ordinary people, and the extreme difficulty of ignoring or circumventing its authority once it had seized on an issue, may be regarded as a learned 21 Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity (New York, 1988), 30-46. 22 Eleh divrei ha-berit [These are the words of the Covenant] (Altona, am 5579 [1818/19]). 23 Or perhaps more precisely: ‘Jewish ultra-conservatism’. Professor Jacob Katz has pointed out that ‘orthodox’ is a borrowing from Christian usage and something of a mis­ nomer when applied to Jews. In Jewish usage it has less to do with theological doctrine than with the practices which Jew are expected to observe and the rules of behaviour to which they are to conform.

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aristocracy, a sort of noblesse de robe—and a near-hereditary one at that. The respect, not to say awe, in which Sofer, as a great Talmudic and moral authority, came to be held was to be extended almost as a matter ofcourse to the dynastic line of which he was a beneficiary and at the same time a founder. He himself was the son-in-law of one of the greatest of the Tal­ mudic luminaries of the age, Rabbi 'Akiva Eiger. His own son, son-inlaw, and grandson went on to partake of the prestige that was his legacy. It was of course an aristocracy of piety and learning. It relied ultimately on merit and virtue, never on material power. It was an aristocracy, there­ fore, in the literal sense of the term, founded on what counted as ‘best’ in the Jewish world as then constituted. By the same token, it stood in starkest possible contrast to the inauthentic, because plutocratic ‘aristocracy* that had begun to evolve at great speed and with a steadily deepening impact of its own on the society and values of the Jews of Europe in the course of the formative years of the period with which this study deals. Where the Hatam Sofer was uncommon was in his ability—and his readiness— to articulate both scholarly judgement and social opinion not only with great force, but with singular clarity. Sofer’s early years were passed in Frankfurt where the teacher who is believed to have influenced him most deeply was Nathan Adler, an exceedingly controversial and independently minded rabbi himself, unbending in his demand for stringent observance of halakhic minutiae, but, unusually, inclined to take more interest in kabbalah mysticism and cosmology than the nineteenth-century central European rabbinate con­ sidered respectable. When Adler was forced out of Frankfurt by the com­ munal notables, clerical and lay (backed by the city’s civil authorities) on the grounds that he was exceeding his authority, Sofer, loyally, went with him, settling eventually, in 1806, in Pressburg (Bratislava). There, in the course of time, he established, and for thirty years headed, a yeshiva (or Talmudic seminary) of considerable renown, achieving personal recogni­ tion as one of the most eminent rabbinic authorities of the day, and emerging in due course as the leading figure in the central European branch of the party of uncompromising and immovable ultraconser­ vatism. The heart of Sofer’s philosophy on the combined matters of doctrine and behaviour was summed up in his famously uncompromising expos­ ition of the Talmudic dictum that ‘the Torah forbids innovation’ (hadash asur min ha-torah). He took this literally. Modification of any kind and in any degree of what had long been established could not fail to be incompatible with halakha and that the rule itself was absolute and all­ embracing. There could be no question of drawing distinctions, fine or rough, between greater and lesser matters, between greater and lesser precepts and injunctions. Innovation, whatever its form and context, was unacceptable. All who cleaved to religious orthodoxy and to the principles

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of behavioural propriety long since laid down by accepted authority were enjoined to reject it.24 Should hunger and misery lead you into temptation... resist [it, ran his message] and do not turn to the idols or to some god ofyour own making!... Be warned not to change your Jewish names, speech, clothing.... Never say: ‘Times have changed!* We have an old Father—praised be His name—who has never changed and never will change.... The order ofprayer and synagogue shall remain forever as it has been up to now, and no one may presume to change anything of its structure.25

To the question whether there was a middle way between strict and uncompromising observance of the halakha and its abandonment the reply of orthodoxy at its most unbending was that there was none and that the dilemma was indeed stark and unforgiving. The position laid down by the Hatam Sofer and his school was that the attempt to subject the fundamentals of Judaism to reconsideration was itself damnable: in that it was designed finally to draw off the independently modernizing Jews from the body of the faithful it was divisive; in that it was evidently intended to gain the approval of those non-Jewish reference groups to whose voices the ears of the modernists within Jewry were now increas­ ingly cocked it was reprehensible; in that it was founded on the assump­ tion that the intellectual and conceptual conventions of the day had indeed to be accommodated was intrinsically flawed. The notion that the ground Judaism was supposed to hold in common with other faiths and cultures might be relevant to the question was therefore fit only to be rejected out of hand as an immense and unpardonable deviation from ancient doctrine, precedent, and the Jewish people’s own self-definition. Characteristically, Sofer’s response to the ‘bitter news’ of the doings of ‘evil men’ in Hamburg was to recall ancient authority. ‘It is very well known,’ he wrote, ‘that in [his] exile, the splendid Daniel [Daniel ish hamudot] knelt down three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, just as he had done before.’26 He then went on to assert the absolute unacceptability of any breach whatsoever in the ‘wall’ or ‘fence’ the Sages had set around the Law—and, by extension and with deliber­ ate intent, about the Jewish people—for its and their protection. As for those who presumed to destroy that fence, who refused to submit to the ‘yoke of heaven’, and who sought to nullify the Covenant into which their forefathers had entered with the Almighty, ‘let them seek to be 24 Famously codified by Yosef Caro in the sixteenth century in his compendium Shulhan Arukh. Dedicated and meticulous observance of the halakhic prescriptions speci­ fied in Caro’s guide remains to this day the ultimate criterion by which true (orthodox) piety will be measured: the corollary being that the more meticulous the observance, the more pious the individual. 25 Cited in W. Gunther Plaut, The Rise of Reform Judaism: A Sourcebook of its European Origins (New York, 1963), 256 f. 26 Sofer in Eleh divrei ha-berit, 7.

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counted and compared with the sages of our own times if that is their claim’. If their response was that they were not of a mind to accept the teachings of the Sages, why then, he wrote, they fell under Maimonidean ruling, that ‘He who repudiates the Oral Law . . . [i.e. the Talmud] is to be classed [and condemned] with atheists’, following which nothing more needed, in his view, to be said.27 The specific justifications the reformers were bold enough to advance were to be dismissed as unworthy. The argument that prayers for the advent of the Messiah and the Restoration of Israel to its Land need no longer be said on the grounds that the Jews had already found ‘tranquil­ lity and goodness among the gentiles’ and no longer required the Land of Israel was blasphemous. The Jews continued to be what they had long been: a people in exile awaiting deliverance—deliverance and Redemp­ tion. It was not illusory material tranquillity that they sought and pined for. It was the privilege of once again dwelling in the presence of God in the place designated for his service and for the observance of his Law. Nor was there anything in this that implied deprecation of the king and high officers of state whose protection we [currendy] enjoy. . . . Nehemia . . . served his king as viceroy in honour and in riches; yet at the sight of the ruined city [ofJerusalem] he grieved.... We [too, for our part] are as cap­ tives of the war ofthe destruction [of the city and the Temple].... while yet duty bound to seek and pray for the welfare of our kings.28

Sofer conceded that it was incumbent upon the Jews to be grateful for the ‘many great kindnesses’ bestowed upon them by ‘the kings and min­ isters ofthe nations’ under whom they lived and to pray for their safety. It did not follow, however, in his view, that they should cease to pine for their true patrimony. There was no reason why this or any other of the wishes and beliefs of the Jews should vex ‘the nations’. The reformers, possibly, thought otherwise. But then they themselves neither anticipated a Return nor believed the words of the prophets who foretold the build­ ing of the Third Temple and the coming of the Messiah. In sum, writing in 1819, his position was that nothing had occurred to justify a change in the Jews’ own long-established conception oftheir destiny as a people and the set view ofthe duties it was incumbent upon them to perform as private individuals. Nor had the fundamentals of their relations with the gentiles and of their condition among them altered. Those who held otherwise were wrong. Those who believed otherwise were simple-minded. It is to be noted, that his views—and the views of his rabbinical col­ leagues generally—were mediated as a matter of course through the lan­ guage of the Law. They tended therefore to be cast in severe and uncompromising terms. Language, tone, and purpose all conspired to ensure that dialogue with the reformers, were it ever attempted, would 27 Ibid. 8-9.

28 Ibid. 9.

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be a dialogue of the deaf. So too did the conceptual difference between the schools and what was held by each of the parties to constitute a valid argument. Whereas modernizers and reformers of all persuasions had it in common, that they appealed to what they held to be universal cat­ egories and to the rights and still more the needs of contemporary man, Sofer and his kind assumed the sanctity of divine law as handed down at Sinai and authoritatively interpreted thereafter. They did not think, much less argue, in universal categories. Universal categories were pre­ cisely what they rejected, at any rate so far as these might be thought applicable to the Jews. This held true of political as well as other obliga­ tions. Sofer was as well aware as any of the new men that the Jews were vulnerable. His gratitude to those ‘kings and ministers’ who were pre­ pared to allow the Jews to live in peace and in their own way need not be thought of as other than genuine. But the duty to pray for the ruler’s wel­ fare and, by implication, to obey him, was wholly distinct in his mind from that quite different wish to identify with the governing power which he detected, correctly, among the reformers. In his view, obedi­ ence to the ruler was a temporary requirement. The true and unvarying obligation was to divine, not earthly, authority. Least of all was it one which they were free to determine in accordance with their private, nec­ essarily ill-informed understanding of their current needs. Yet there may be detected in this great master of anachronism some­ thing that was distinctly of his place and time after all: a view that bore traces of the influence of the romantic movement and that therefore, in one or two respects, were not far removed from those who were sharpest in their criticism of the place and function of his own people. Sofer placed great value on agriculture. By virtue of its evident contribution to the most fundamental of the needs of humankind, it was superior, in his eyes, to commerce and industry. It was superior too in its being the true and ultimate source of a country’s wealth and prosperity. But, above all, it was morally superior. Commerce, industry, and finance were all sources of much that was evil and fearful in society. They were inseparable from man’s sad propensity to employ his energies in the search for luxury, property, and the opportunity to preen himself before his fellows and set himself above them, as opposed to being content with the little he really needed to satisfy his material wants and ensure some freedom to devote time and energy to higher things. No doubt, the merchant did play an important role in the economy; but it was not, Sofer thought, a product­ ive role. Nor was that ofthe bankers: necessary, perhaps, but not productive. It was participation in the production of goods that earned a man an honourable place in human society, not the competitive accumulation of capital. For that way lay moral corruption, social and international conflict, the mad pursuit of profit and prestige, and the creation of whole classes of fearful and obsequious inferiors—in brief, the entire, ghastly

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structure of power and wealth organized and presided over inexorably by selfish, violent, and extortionate regimes.29 A second respect in which Sofer will be found to have been not unob­ servant of the world around him, and perhaps for that reason perhaps marginally more liberal in some of his views than were many of his col­ leagues (and even some of his disciples), was his relative tolerance of the study of secular subjects. Where others ruled them out totally, Sofer, wiser and, perhaps, more confident of his authority, was prepared to allow them provided only that the empirical investigation of the world proceeded selectively and could be shown to serve, if only indirectly, the higher purpose and the infinitely more meritorious activity of the one form of study which it was the undoubted business ofJews (the men of Jewry at all events) to engage in unreservedly: the study of the Law. Sofer is generally believed to have had a command of the German language (not an attribute to be assumed of the majority of men of his class in his time, even when natives of Germany) and to have delved fairly deeply himself into mathematics and the physical sciences. He saw no objection to the translation of classic Jewish texts into German on a limited basis and for carefully defined purposes. He said of Rabbi David Sintzheim,30 with whom he was for many years in friendly correspondence, that among his Alsatian colleague’s distinguishing and praiseworthy qualities was his command of both Jewish and secular learning—to which he, Sintzheim, owed his special standing and prestige among ‘the king and his ministers’ of France. But Sofer drew back from the kind of large-scale translation ofJewish texts into the vernacular and the general intermin­ gling and mutual fertilization ofJewish and general scholarship that the modernist maskilitn (of whom more below) seemed to him to have in mind. The fundamental question, for him, was not balance and propor­ tion, but primacy. He viewed both reliance (by Jews) on alien philoso­ phies as a basis for the interpretation of their own Jewish texts and the use (even the innocent use) ofjewish learning as a vehicle for the inculcation of alien ideas and doctrines as impermissible. Such had been the outcome historically of the original translation of the Bible into Greek (the Septuagint); such, he believed, would be the consequence of the maskilim's ambitious projects of translation of Jewish texts into German. But he does not seem to have been fully consistent in this respect. It is recorded that at one stage a project for the translation of the Talmud itself gained his approval, later to be withdrawn when the results dissatisfied him.31

29 Eli ezer Katz, He-Hatam Sofer: Rabbi Moshe Sofer, hayyav vibrato (Jerusalem, 1960), 118-23. 30 Presiding member of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin. ” Katz, He-Hatam Sofer, 103; Shelomo Sofer (ed.), Sefer Igrot Sofrim (Vienna, 1929), part 2,70-1.

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Where Sofer was entirely unbending was in his objection to the move­ ment for emancipation. This he regarded with the deepest distrust. He saw it as leading ineluctably to religious reform, thence to assimilation, and finally to the collapse of the structure and integrity of the Jewish people as a whole. Such material liberties as the gentiles were prepared to grant the Jews needed to be measured, he thought, against the loss of spiritual free­ dom the Jews themselves would unfailingly suffer. The price of civil rights would be the loss of soul, the cost of personal freedom the loss of national freedom. It was true that an enslaved and persecuted Jewry, quite apart from the suffering to which it was subjected, was a people unable to worship and do God’s bidding. But there was another form of enslavement. The source of the affliction could be the contrary: it could be the liberty granted Israel by the kingdom and the privileges and attention bestowed upon [its members]... Whence in practice a greater calamity than the other would befall the Jews in that, on this earth [i.e. as is the way of the world], the Jews would tend to move ever closer towards the king’s men and imitate their manners and abandon Torah and its duties, all of their own free will. But this too is in the nature of an enslavement, for while they would be free [in the civic sense], in fact it would be the abomination of the land that would rule them.32

Sofer was not an isolated figure. What he expressed, in much clearer and more confident terms than was usual, were the immediate responses and concerns ofwhat would for some time to come be the greater part of European Jewry. And in much of what he said he did unquestionably touch a nerve that was likely to be present in the make-up even of those who, in practice, were disinclined to follow his injunctions. The great strength of orthodoxy was only nominally in the realm of ideas. Its true appeal was to the emotive and the irrational: to loyalty, to fear of the unknown and the unfamiliar, to concern for dignity and self-respect, and to doctrines and dogmas which, in turn, owed their special force to their having been inculcated and internalized and regularly transmitted from father to son over centuries as well, of course, as simple faith and confi­ dence in the divine—strong in some, no more than residual in others. In the long term, therefore, what he and the other masters of orthodoxy had now to contend with was not theological opposition, but social action and social processes. The critics of orthodoxy from within Jewry had ideas of their own, as we shall see. But these too derived their force less from their intrinsic cogency than from the needs and desires of men and women whose impatience for change was growing mightily and would grow still further and faster as liberation from the social system to which absolute loyalty to orthodoxy had once bound them took root. What would prove irrefutable in what was presented as religious reform was, in fact, its social logic. It would appear to ever greater numbers of western 32 Moshe Sofer, Derashot, ii. 500b. Cited in Katz, He-Hatam Sofer, 87.

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and central European Jews, that to maintain the old norms of conduct and the old communal structure would be to fix the Jews’ presence at the very margins of both contemporary society and the economy forever. It would be to do so, moreover, at the very point in the general evolution of Europe—western and west-central Europe, at all events—when all was manifesdy in flux and progress of a hitherto inconceivable kind was being made on all social, economic, and political fronts. To reject this new Europe in the spirit demanded of them by the Hatam Sofer and his school was, for a rapidly growing number of people, to evoke a prospect of stasis and entrenchment that was too anomalous and too disheartening to be bearable.

Ill

As a class, the first to break out of the old shell of conformity and sub­ mission to internal authority was the new plutocracy. To be sure, it may be regarded as the old eighteenth-century class of court Jews and military purveyors triumphandy enriched and expanded. The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had lasted longer than any that had occurred in the pre­ vious century, the armies had been incomparably larger, the military and political arena had been virtually congruent with Europe in its entirety, and larger numbers ofJewish entrepreneurs than ever before were called upon to serve. Their reward, as before, was the grant ofthose formal priv­ ileges and marks of esteem that set them apart from their brethren for all to see and marvel at: the right of residence where it had formerly been denied and was still otherwise restricted (in Vienna and St Petersburg, for example), the cancellation of the badges and taxes that at once identified and exploited Jews as such, and ennoblement. Most decisive and reflective of the new age, however, was the circumstance that the grant of status and privilege, together with the security of accumulated wealth, had ceased to be reversible. Consider Alsatian Jewry, the first substantial, fully traditional European community to enjoy formal emancipation. Deeply impoverished before the Revolution, its general condition changed only slowly in the after­ math. Just prior to the convening of the Assembly of the Notables in Paris in 1807, the préfet of the Bas-Rhin department reported to Paris that of the 600 highest tax payers in the Bas-Rhin, only two were Jews. (Since there were then all of 22,000 Jews in the department as opposed to 455,000 non-Jews, this was nominally disproportionate by a factor of 15.) Most Jews, he informed his superiors, were in the business of second­ hand goods and small loans, as before.33 On the other hand, what was true 33 R. Neher-Bemheim, Documents inédits sur l’entrée des Juifs dans la société française 1750-1850, i (Tel Aviv, 1977), 324-8.

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of most of the Jewish population was not true of all; and the mechanics of the rise to great affluence of some among them are instructive?4 The pre-revolutionary precedents for Jews in Alsace and elsewhere to serve as purveyors to the French armies were firm, as has been noted. What changed was the scale of the demand for food, clothing, and horses and the immensely steep rise in monetary reward that followed. In the win­ ter of 1794/5 Zachariah Cerf of Metz took it upon himself to supply the French Rhine army with no less than 12,000 tons of wheat for which, in June 1795, he was paid 3 million francs. The brothers Cerfberr, in Feb­ ruary 1795, at the behest of the Committee of Public Safety, undertook to supply the revolutionary army with 40,000 horses within six months of the signing of the contract, earning a similarly large sum. Where pay­ ment was in paper money, the purveyors learned to invest their receipts in real estate before the inevitable inflation took its toll. Paid 3.6 million francs in 1795 for supplying the army with food, cloth, and iron, Léon Fould (with one other), promptly purchased 230 hectares of state land with the proceeds. Five years later Fould was among the two hundred principal shareholders of the new Napoleonic Bank of France and both the shift from the provision of food and horses to that of money and the conversion ofpurveyor to financier was complete. But it needs to be said, too, that such success was contingent on each major provisioner being able to build up an entire network of subcontractors to serve him. The brothers Cerfberr maintained commercial relations with no less than 67 lesser suppliers, purveyors, and provisioners, all Jews. In the years in ques­ tion, by Michael Graetz s calculation, the heads of over a quarter of all Jewish households in Alsace were engaged in some way in the provision­ ing of the French armies and in some small rural communities as many as half the local Jewish population might be involved. In their essentials, therefore, these were so many replications of the method whereby Oberkriegsfaktor Samuel Oppenheimer, purveyor to the Habsburg armies, and others of his class had operated a century earlier. And it is interesting to note that something of the same reliance on ethno-familial connec­ tions would be maintained by the sometime purveyors upon their entry into the more exalted realm of banking. Much like the families of emi­ nent rabbinical dynasties, they tended—at first quite strongly, later less so—to consolidate their connections and ensure mutual support by marriage. When Ber Léon Fould was in financial trouble during the 1810-11 economic crisis the Oppenheim bank of Cologne came to his aid: Foulds son Baruch (Benoît) was married to Helena, Avraham Oppenheim’s daughter. The result, notably when viewed from without, was the arrival on the periphery of the very highest circles of society in 34 Closely examined by M. Graetz, ‘ ‘Aliyato vishki'ato shel sapak ha-zava ha-yehudi be-‘itot milhama’, Zion, 56, 3 (1991), 255-73.

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Europe’s major capitals of a wholly new class of Jewish men, and women too, who had rapidly and somewhat spectacularly coalesced into a sort of supra-communal, all-European, but in any case readily identifiable cate­ gory of grandees. Viewed from within Jewry itself, its members duly took on the meretricious lustre that habitually accrued to people who were thought to have been granted free entrée into the non-Jewish world. But if such a rise and consequent notoriety were rapid and with­ out precedent, decline would follow. The children and grandchildren of the founding members of this new élite tended to remove themselves. Marriages (and the dowries the brides brought with them) ceased to be treated as matters of material significance, sought for and arranged with the consolidation and perpetuation of financial connections in mind. Exogenous marriage and religious conversion would register ever more frequently as the surer, in some societies indispensable, staging-posts along the route towards the true summits of society, on the conquest of which a high proportion of the members this class were embarked.35 There are ambiguities about apostasy by Jews which have served to make the full meaning of what might seem a simple and clear-cut step uncertain. On the Christian side of the divide the tendency (at least since the invention in Spain of the term ‘new Christian’ and the concept of ‘purity of blood’—limpieza de sangre) to distinguish between the formal religious significance of baptism as a Jew’s entry into the Christian world and its social significance, the terms on which he or she is likely to be received into that world in actual practice, has been a strong one, strongest of all in modern times. Judaism has always regarded it, needless to say, as a major and unpardonable sin. But all sinners, even the apostates, remained in some sense or other members of the Jewish people: Jews of a very inferior and so to speak damaged sort, but Jews none the less—the more so as, except where the conversion took place under duress or the motives were crassly opportunistic, apostasy remained fundamentally incomprehensible to the Jewish mind and at least as much a source of 35 The proliferation of new style Jewish grandees in nineteenth-century Jewry was too extensive a phenomenon for a representative list to be compiled and incorporated into the present study. But any such list, however short, would have to include the Arnsteins of Vienna, notably Nathan Adam von Amstein (1748-1838) and his brother-in-law and partner Bernhard von Eskeles (1753-1839), who were among theJewish notables who petitioned the Congress of Vienna for a general grant of civil rights to the Jews; the French banking dynasty founded by Ber Léon Fould (1767-1855); the banking family founded in Baden by Salomon Haber (1764-1839); the Kaulla family of Württemberg financiers, led, unusually, by a woman, Caroline Raphael (1739-1809), with her brother and successor Jacob Raphael (1750-1810); the Cologne banking house founded by Solomon Oppenheim (1772-1828); the Speyer family of bankers of Frankfurt whose activities were later extended to the United States, as were those of the Warburgs, originally of Hamburg; the Rothschilds, originally of Frankfurt, later of Paris, London, Vienna, and Naples as well; the de Worms dynasty, originally of Frankfurt, domiciled in England, connected by marriage and business to the Rothschilds, ennobled by both Austria and Britain; and in eastern Europe the Guenzburgs.

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INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

bewilderment and distrust as anger. To the secular Jewish mind no less than to that of the believer, to apostatize is not simply to transgress, it is to betray. In any event, precise measurement of the phenomenon has never been possible, partly for the reasons that have rendered the collec­ tion of statistics on the Jews difficult at all times: shifting frontiers, con­ tinual migration, rising populations overall, census figures of doubtful reEability in many cases, and a total absence offigures in others; and partly because in many cases the Jewish origins of the baptized and their descendents have been kept secret. The difficulty of comparing one moving target (the number of conversions at any one time) with another (the entirety of the Jewish population in question) is immense.36 What is certain, however, is that while in absolute terms and in terms relative to the total Jewish population formal conversions to Christianity in nineteenth-century Europe were few in all parts, the difference between eastern Europe and western and central Europe is striking. The Jewish population of eastern and south-eastern Europe rose from about 2 million to 7.4 million in the course of the century. The number of conversions taking place in this period has been estimated at no more than approxim­ ately 85,000 which suggests a notional annual rate of less than a thousand souls, or not much more than 0.01 per cent of the total Jewish population in those parts, in an average year. ‘That about six million persecuted and miserable wretches remain steadfastly faithful to a religion that causes their life to be changed into a fiery furnace without the angel to keep it cool,’ wrote an EngEsh observer in 1900, ‘is the nearest approach to a grandiose miracle that has been vouchsafed to this unbelieving gener­ ation.’ Were any of the measures employed against the Russian Jews appEed to their neighbours they would suffice, he thought, to convert three-fourths of Christian Russia to Shamanism or Buddhism within ‘a week’.37 In western and central Europe, the total number of conversions in the course of the entire nineteenth century was only sEghtly larger— an estimated 100,000—than in the east. But since the Jewish population of western and central Europe was very much smaUer, rising from about 0.4 miUion early in the century to about 1.3 miUion towards the century’s end, the rate of conversion was a good deal higher, probably ten times as high. It was, besides, a preponderantly urban phenomenon: almost unknown in smaU towns and villages, commoner in cities, commonest of aU in the very largest cities. It has been estimated that in Berlin alone, between 1800 and 1924,5,250Jews were converted to Protestant Chris­ tianity (always more common in Germany than conversion to Roman 36 But see, for example, N. Samter, Judentaufen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1906); and among recent studies T. M. Endelman (ed.) Jewish Apostasy in the Modem World (New York, 1987). 37 E. B. Lanin, ‘The Jews in Russia’, Fortnightly Review, 54 (1900), 498, cited in Carl Cohen, ‘The Road to Conversion’, LBIYB 6 (1961), 260.

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Catholicism). And slow at first, the rate of conversion rose steadily both absolutely and proportionately in the last two decades of the nineteenth century: 43 (0.8 per cent of the city’s Jewish population) in 1880; 146 (0.18 per cent) in 1890; 160 (0.16 per cent) in 1900.38 In Vienna the numbers were greater and the rise was steeper: 39 Jews converted to Christianity in 1870,110 in 1880,302 in 1890, and 559 in 1900.39 In the course of the eight years 1898—1907 4 per cent of the total Jewish popu­ lation of Vienna apostatized. Even in the somewhat more settled Jewish populations of urban Bohemia and Moravia the rates were higher than in Berlin, although lower than in Vienna: 2.25 per cent in Prague in the same period, 2.5 per cent in Brno.40 On the face of things, then, a paradox. In the illiberal east (where in all relevant respects Romania was soon to move alongside imperial Russia), where pressure to apostatize was still practised sporadically, as we will shortly see, the numbers of apostates as a proportion of the Jewish popu­ lation were negligible, as before. In the partially liberalized west, where public, but more especially state, pressure on Jews to convert to Chris­ tianity had ended and the condition of the Jews had greatly eased in other ways, apostasy had at any rate ceased to be uncommon. But the paradox is resolved when it is noted that the apostate in the west was almost invari­ ably the man or woman who had already gone some way, often a very considerable way, into the non-Jewish world, ambition—often very high ambition—providing the final, powerful push out of Jewry altogether. Ambition in its gross form is well illustrated by the case of Karl Marx’s father Heinrich. Heinrich Marx’s life plan was twice altered out of all recognition: first by the entry of French revolutionary troops into the Rhineland in 1792, then by their withdrawal almost two decades later. Soon after their entry the French decreed emancipation for the Jews. But although they followed up their original measures by imposing the limi­ tations set upon them by Napoleon’s décret infâme of 1808, even a limited form ofJewish emancipation was an event of a genuinely revolutionary kind for all concerned in this part of Germany: for the Jews certainly, but for the non-Jews as well. The history of Rhineland Jewry had been a long and unhappy one, an exceptionally dismal chronicle of persecution, mas­ sacre, mob violence, expulsion, and extortion. The community in the city of Cologne itself dated from Roman times and was the oldest in Ger­ many, but its story culminated in 1424 in what was intended to be a final, irredeemable expulsion—to be rescinded only three and three-quarters 38 Based on Samter, Judentaufen, 146-7. For additional, later figures and for figures of intermarriage, see below, pp. 315 ff. 39 Figures collated by Jakob Thon, cited in Marsha L. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867—1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany, NY, 1983), 132. 40 M. A. Riff, ‘Assimilation and Conversion in Bohemia: Secession from the Jewish Community in Prague 1868—1917’, in LBIYB 26 (1981), 78.

126

INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

centuries later under the French. Heinrich Marx had been among the beneficiaries of the French regime, having been allowed to study law. Unfortunately for him, he had just been about to begin a practice of his own at the low legal rank of avoué when the French were replaced by the Prussians in 1814. Would he be allowed to proceed to the German legal rank of Rechtsanwalt? His application for permission to do so was passed to Berlin. The answer, when it came down after two years of deliberation, was negative. No Jew could be endowed with authority (as the rank of Rechtsanwalt would have provided) over Christians. And the blow to his aspirations was the more painful for Heinrich Marx who, throughout the years of the French, had been careful to display his own unquestioned and obsequious loyalty to the Prussians. Like the Rothschilds in Frankfurt, he had, that is to say, in his very minor way, gambled on the eventual down­ fall of Napoleon. But the authorities were unmoved and it was clear to him that, if he were not to abandon his professional ambitions altogether, the only remaining course was baptism. There is some evidence that he was reluctant to take the step. It is known that when he took it he resolved on Lutheranism, totally unrepresented in Trier, as opposed to the dominant Catholicism, and likely therefore to spare him regular church attendance. The ceremony itself was conducted in semi-secrecy by a chaplain to one of the Prussian regiments on Rhineland occupation duties. The rest of his family remained Jewish for some time. Still, within the decade, all in Heinrich Marx’s immediate’family had followed him to the font— although how authentic their Christianity might ever have been remains an open question. What is certain is that little residual loyalty to Jews and Judaism remained: none at all, on the evidence, in the case of the man who has been the cause of such interest as has been taken in Heinrich Marx himself.41 It was Heinrich, it seems probable, who determined that Karl, born a Jew in 1818, should not be circumcised,42 and, it is certain, should be baptized in his childhood (in 1824 or 1825). It is beyond question, too, that despite Karl’s uncle, one Shemu’el Marx, officiating as a rabbi in Trier, the boy was brought up with nothing of an authentically Jewish nature being taught him. Of there being an historically important connection between these circumstances and Karl Marx’s own considered views on matters Jewish (of which more later) there can be little doubt. Social ambition when unadulterated by grosser, material purposes, is of another order. Its springs lie deeper. It seeks justification or rational­ ization. It is likely to be a good deal more fraught. Rahel Varnhagen, née Levin (1771—1833), a woman who fought her way desperately, by sheer grit, but also by apostasy and intermarriage, out of her run-of-the-mill, 41 Shelomo Na’aman, ‘Heinrich Marx, Karl Marx ve-Eleanor Marx: shelosha dorot nokhah etgar ha-shivyon ha-ezrahi’, gion, 57, 4 (1992), 395-427. 42 Ibid. 408.

DISJUNCTIONS

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orthodox, commercial middle-class origins and into the glittering reaches of Berlin’s high society, provides a celebrated, effectively proto­ typical case in point. That hers was a journey that she was capable of pur­ suing to its end was remarkable. The unremitting despair of this gifted woman at her having been born a Jewess, even upon safe arrival at her destination, even when presiding over her famous salon, is still more interesting and telling. Of its kind, her inconsolably bitter, passionate, but well-considered view of her ‘disgrace’, her ‘infamous birth’, and her true place in the social order is memorable: How loathsome it is always having to establish one’s identity first. That alone is enough to make it so repulsive to be a Jew. ... I really do not understand at all what can be done for and with the Jews. .. . Hitherto it has not been possible to do anything for the scattered, neglected, and more than all that, deservedly despised nation.... People like us [she concluded] cannot be Jews.. .. The Jew must be extirpated from us, that is the sacred truth, and it must be done even if life itself were uprooted in the process.45

But it is the case ofHeinrich Heine (1797-1856) that excites the great­ est interest and, in the present context, is of most importance precisely because he was, arguably, the greatest lyric poet in the German language and certainly the greatest ofJewish figures to have emerged in Germany in modern times. If it verges on the absurd to link so complex, honest, self-deprecating, critical, and certainly more ironic observer of both society and self with Rahel Varnhagen the social climber, let alone with Heinrich Marx the obscure Rhineland attorney, it remains that he stands to this day as the best known of all early nineteenth-century GermanJewish apostates, as he himself seems to have been at least half aware. And there is, after all, the sobering fact that Heine, a man of infinitely greater worth than either Varnhagen or Marx, had this in common with them— that he had responded to the bite of worldly ambition in much the same way as they had. But finally it is of the highest importance in this con­ nection, that Heine, as we shall see, was both a close observer of, and for some time an active participant in, Jewish affairs as was his sometime friend and partner in apostasy, Eduard Gans (1798-1839). Both had grown up in the age of Napoleon, Heine in the Rhineland city of Düs­ seldorf, Gans in Berlin. Both were sons of commercial families of mod­ erate standing. Both had had non-Jewish schooling. Both had gone on to university. Both aspired mightily to academic, or, if not academic, then official distinction and appointments. Gans was among the founders of a society devoted to a secularly minded, academically rigorous study of Judaism (on which more below), one of the declared purposes of which was to teach other Germans something about the Jews, heighten the 45 Cited in H. Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life ofaJewess (London, 1957), 102,105, 178-80. Emphasis in original.

128

INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

regard in which they were held, and so facilitate their integration into German society. Heine had been the group’s first secretary. However, when each in his turn was halted at the first, formal obstacle to an academic or official career, each chose to circumvent the obstacle by conversion. Denied a regular academic post at the University of Berlin to which none doubted that he was eminently qualified, Gans agreed fairly readily to baptism. ‘If the state is so stupid,’ he is reported as saying, ‘as to forbid me to serve it in a capacity which suits my particular talents unless I profess something I do not believe—and something the responsible minister knows I do not believe: all right then, it shall have its wish.’44 Heine, more sensitive than his friend Gans, thereupon composed (although never published) a bitter denunciatory poem (to which Professor S. S. Prawer has drawn attention). It runs in part: Und du hast dich, kühlem Blutes, Mit den lieben Herrn verständigt.

Und du bist zu Kreuz gekrochen, Zu dem Kreuz, das du verachtest, Das du noch nur wenig Wochen in den Staub zu treten dachtest!45

But the truth was that Heine had preceded Gans along that path; and that there were two real differences between the two young men. Unlike Gans and others, Heine believed to the end of his life that he had dis­ graced himself; and Heine, as is well known, was never rewarded for the step he had taken. Gans, in contrast, did well. He was duly appointed to a university chair and proved to be immensely successful as a professor of jurisprudence, enjoying his glory as an Ordinarius for a decade until his death at the early age of 42. Curiously, he was succeeded by another Jew­ ish apostate, Friedrich Julius Stahl (né Joel Jolson, 1802-61). Stahl’s back­ ground was similar to that of Heine and Gans except for his conversion to Lutheranism coming at an earlier age and being most probably the consequence of a genuine reconsideration of religious and social, but also, unusually, political values as well. In further contrast to the liberal Gans (and, needless to say, to the politically radical Heine), Stahl would evolve as one of the great legal-philosophical defenders of Prussian con­ servatism and, very particularly, of Prussia itself as a Christian state. His view of the matter ofJewish emancipation, over and above his jaundiced view of ‘the Jewish tribe’ itself, was firmly negative. The Jews, he thought, needed to be kept legally and politically apart from the general 44 Cited in S. S. Prawer, Heine's Jewish Comedy (Oxford, 1985), 12. 45 Ibid. 15, where the following translation of half of the first verse and all of the second is offered: ‘Now [that] your blood has cooled somewhat, you have I come to an arrange­ ment with the gracious lords. I You have humbled yourself before the cross, I the very cross that you despised, I that only a few short weeks ago I you sought to tread into the dust!’

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German Volkstum. They should not be allowed to be more than secondclass citizens. Whereas all citizens, regardless of religious faith, were en­ titled to civil rights (bürgerliche Rechte), political rights (politische Rechte) must, in a Christian state, be limited to members of recognized Christian churches only.46 It needs to be said, however, that the path along which most apostates resolved to tread differed only marginally, in the final analysis, from that which all others who sought to venture out of the old, closed Jewish community were prepared to take. Brute professional and social ambition aside, it was a journey whose attraction lay in its being thought of as leading inexorably to a broader, braver, freer, nobler, altogether more cultivated world, a world untouched, or only negligibly so, by the provinciality and vulgarity that marked, so the travellers were inclined to believe, the one in which they had previously been confined. It was in all cases, that is to say, a matter of anticipating great delights at journey’s end: in the great, rapidly growing capital cities which it had now begun to be possible for Jews to enter, to establish themselves, and to prosper in. The exceptionally talented, energetic, and ambitious hoped to be able at last to slake their new-found thirst for the full individual freedom they believed they would enjoy. For some it was the novelty or advantages or the simple glory of playing a role in great affairs that drew them. Others, still looking inward, saw the dismanding of the ghetto in material form, but more especially in its figurative sense, as the opening of a road to internal change. All such aspiration constituted rebellion against the old Jewish regime, however, a means of establishing social, economic, but above all mental and ideological, distance from the community as it was still constituted and from those who still ruled and sustained it. Otherwise the rebels had little in common. Their purposes were too disparate, if not totally incompatible. The very attempt to group and categorize them tends to distort a social scene of which the dominant features were dis­ order, mixed and conflicting motives, incoherence, uncertainty, and, to be sure, much vulgar material opportunism as well. In no case was what was on offer to the rebels in practice straightforward progress onward and upward to their goals. It was rather an endless series of choices at a suc­ cession of countless crossroads, a perpetual need to overcome obstacles of one kind or another and periodically to retreat as well as advance. Many stages along the journey were emotionally fraught. None was easy to cal­ culate ahead of time. Only the fact of movement out of the confines of the community being contingent upon acculturation was constant. Lan­ guage in the first instance, internalized patterns of thought, behaviour, and social values and those stores of common knowledge that serve to 46 F. J. Stahl, Der christliche Staat und sein Verhältnis zu Deismus und Judenthum (Berlin, 1847), 31.

130

INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

denote the native and, in their absence, reveal the alien—these were the indispensable items of travelling equipment. In principle, of course, it was here, in the realm of culture, that the final promise and purpose of liber­ ation, toleration, and emancipation were generally considered to He.

IV In the early decades of the century it was still commonly the case that Jews in all parts of Europe had a system of education of their own. It was inefficient in many ways, narrowly focused, deeply in need of reform, by western standards hopelessly inadequate, but in eastern Europe capable of assuring the Jews a degree of Hteracy virtually unknown at the time among their gentile neighbours. A senior official of the Russiancontrolled kingdom of Poland believed in 1818 that Almost every one of their families hires a tutor to teach its children. There are undoubtedly 25,000 tutors per 100,000 families. We [i.e. the non-Jewish popu­ lation] do not have more than 868 schools in towns and villages and 27,985 pupils in all. They [the Jews] probably have the same number of pupils because their entire population studies. Girls too can read, even the girls of the poorest families. Every family, be it in the most modest circumstances, buys books, because there will be at least ten books in every household. Most of those inhabiting the huts in our [non-Jewish] villages have only recently heard of an alphabet book and of books of religion and morals that console one in times of pain and affliction.47

In its unorganized and informal way it was no less therefore than a comprehensive system of general education. The majority of Jewish children acquired at least some knowledge of basic biblical and religious texts and learned to read and write in Hebrew and in their Yiddish vernacular. The results satisfied neither the authorities nor the modernists among the Jews themselves, but in any case there was no alternative. Attempts to enter Jewish children into schools serving the general Catholic population in Poland tended to fail in the face of Catholic resentment and equally strong objections by most Jews. The Lublin district education committee reported to the central State Committee for Religions and Public Education in December 1817, that The committee was of the opinion that it was impossible to persuade the [Jewish] population to send their children to schools serving CathoHc children jointly. The Jews, being unerdightened and sunk in superstitions, do not dare, despite our many rebukes, to dress their children in non-traditional clothing. They do not dare remove their skullcaps nor cut off their side-curls. Although

47 Quoted in Sabina Lewin, ‘Batei-ha-sefer ha-elementariim ha-rishonim li-ladim benei dat Moshe be-Varsha, ba-shanim 1818-1830’, Gal-'Ed, 1. (1973), 68.

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the Jews in Lublin did approach [us] and expressed a desire to send their children to the elementary schools, when they learned of the terms of admission they stated that they were unable to fulfil those conditions.48

In the west resistance to the modernization ofJewish schooling with all its likely social consequences was weaker, but not negligible. Alsace, its Jewish population being initially closest of any in the west to that of east­ ern European Jewry, but subject from the first to the strongest of mod­ ernizing influences by revolutionary, Napoleonic, Restoration, and Second Empire France, and Second Reich Germany in succession, pro­ vides particularly abundant evidence of traditionalist Jews being pulled both ways.49 As late as the early 1830s, nine-tenths of all Jewish children of primary school age in the department of the Bas-Rhin were receiving no modern education worthy of the name. In the country areas espe­ cially, children continued to be subject to inferior instruction at the hands of untrained and incompetent traditional teachers (melamditn) in crowded, unsanitary, dark, and generally intolerable physical conditions. As in Poland, this was partly due to the still very common refusal to send children to what were to all intents and purposes Christian schools, partly to the Jews’ insistence on maintaining and running schools of their own however inadequate they might be, and partly to there being no statesupported system of education that was both fully compulsory and secu­ lar until late in the century.50 Still, even in the country villages, the signs of a slow process of accul­ turation were evident, the declining presence of Hebrew signatures on marriage documents attesting to the diffusion of the French language through the Alsatian countryside. As late as the 1820s and 1830s a quar­ ter of the males and half of all females were still unable to sign their names on official documents in Latin script despite their having lived all their lives in the post-emancipatory period. Not until the 1860s had the pro­ portions dropped to one-tenth and one-sixth respectively. The rate at 48 Quoted ibid. 70. 49 See especially Paula E. Hyman in her The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace (New Haven, 1991); and Neher-Bemheim, Documents inédits, i, ii, as well. 50 Hyman, Emancipation, 101-3; 66. An indicator of progress made under the Third Republic towards the end of the century and beyond is provided by what were found to be the educational qualifications of Jewish recruits to the French army, as follows: Primary %

1867-9 1885-7 1905-7

— 47 66

Post-primary and higher %

— 9 13

Professional

%

11 15 17

Source: Doris Bensimon-Donath, Socio-demographique des Juifs de France et d’Algérie: 1867-1907 (Paris, 1976).

132

INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

which French names and Gallicized biblical names (e.g. Rachelle for Rachel, Jacques for Jacob) replaced Hebrew and traditional Jewish (i.e. Yiddish) names in the Alsatian countryside was similarly slow. In the communes examined by Paula Hyman, traditional Jewish names were given to 76 per cent of the males and 29 per cent of the females of the cohorts born in 1770-89, the proportions falling to 64 per cent and 11 per cent respectively for the cohorts born in the 1850s.51 However, mat­ ters were otherwise in the cities of Alsace, which in the mid-century accounted for about a fifth of the total Jewish population of the province. Jews whose families had taken up residence in Strasbourg after the Revolution, but had themselves been born before it, bore French and German names, as opposed to Hebrew or Jewish ones, in approximately the same proportions as country Jews. Permanent residence in Strasbourg having been forbidden Jews before the emancipation, they would have been ofsimilar background to those oftheir contemporaries who were still in the countryside. After the Revolution, all changed (see Table 2.1).52 Table 2.1. French and German (as opposed to Hebrew and Jewish) names bome byJews in Strasbourg Date of birth

Males %

Females %

Pre-revolution 1820s 1850s

33 46 82

70 88 93

Equally telling are the data on secondary school (lycée and collège) stu­ dents in Alsace collated in the course of a government survey conducted in 1864. While the Jewish population of the province remained a fairly steady fraction of the total population (3 per cent in 1784; 3.5 per cent in 1861), the Jewish fraction of the student body had grown from zero to 8 per cent. Jewish and non-Jewish students were found to be aspiring to middle-class occupations in commerce, industry, and the professions in roughly the same proportions; and these, broadly, were the occupations which Jewish and non-Jewish students ended by taking up equally. The particular novelty in the case of the Jews was their desire, in almost exactly the same proportions as the gentiles (slightly over a quarter), to be admit­ ted to a military academy or to one of the grandes écoles. No less signifi­ cantly, success rates in each case were almost identical (at c.10 per cent).53 51 Hyman, Emancipation, 66-9. 52 Ibid. 123. The fact that there was a stronger tendency to give women rather than men non-Jewish names both before and after 1789 is worth noting. 53 Allowance has been made, however, for the fact that while 5 per cent of the Jewish students wished to be admitted to the École Polytechnique and the Ponts et Chaussées

DISJUNCTIONS

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All in aU, the préfet for the Alsatian department of Bas-Rhin had some reason to report to the minister of the interior in Paris in 1843, with evident satisfaction, that the effect of the emancipation on ‘the civil and private Eves’ of the Jews had been commendable. There had been created among them a middle class which, in externals at any rate, has shed ‘the flaws [du vice] for which members of this religion were rightly blamed’. Urdike Alsatian Jewry’s lower classes, its middle class was fuUy disposed to make the most of its opportunities for social and inteUectual progress.54 Similar trends, displacement from country to town, from autonomous Jewish to general pubEc education, and of aspiration to, and actual entry into, occupations and professions of a higher status, can be identified in all parts of Europe. Most spectacular, and contributing most profoundly to the process ofacculturation throughout the continent, was the huge influx ofJews into the major, especiaUy capital cities of central Europe. The Jew­ ish population of BerEn was 3,300 in 1816 (1.2 per cent of the total); 12,700 in 1855 (2.9 per cent); 36,300 in 1871 (4.15 per cent); 94,391 in 1895 (4.5 per cent). The rise of the Jewish population in the two capitals of the Habsburg Empire was faster yet, as can be seen in Table 2.2.55 And much the same occurred in those areas of the Russian Empire—and within those areas, in the cities—in which Jews were aUowed to reside, Warsaw, the capital of Russian-ruled Poland (from which, after 1807 Jews were no longer barred) and the industrial city of Lodz among them (see Table 2.3).56 Leaving aside for the moment the supremely important case of Russia proper, admission to schools, universities, entry into the professions, and, in the unique case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, admission to the officer corps as weU, foUowed suit. By 1851 there were 1,251 Jewish stu­ dents in Austrian secondary schools, by 1903/4 the number had risen by a factor of 12.5 to 15,880 (that of non-Jewish students had risen by a fac­ tor of only 4.5 in the same period). On average, in the Habsburg domains, Jewish students accounted for 13 to 14 per cent of the total student body.57 (3 per cent being admitted), none applied to St Cyr or to the Naval College to which no less than 8.6 of the non-Jewish students applied (and 4.6 were admitted) (see Hyman, Emancipation, 117-19). 54 Neher-Bemheim, Documents inédits, ii. 358-9. 55 See Wolfdieter Bihl, ‘Diejuden’, in Die Habsbuigermonarchie 1848-1918, iii. Die Volker des Reiches (Vienna, 1980), 884-5. Or, to inverse the figures, whereas 97.8 per cent ofall Jews in ‘Cisleithanian’ Austria in 1846 were to be found in Galicia, Bohemia, and Moravia and only 0.9 per cent in Lower Austria, by 1910 the proportion in Lower Austria had risen to 14.07 per cent and that for the other three provinces had fallen to 76.03 per cent (ibid. 889). 56 Lucjan Dobroszycki, ‘The Fertility of Modem Polish Jewry’, in Paul Ritterband (ed.), Modern Jewish Fertility (Leiden, 1981), 67. 57 High average figures should not obscure differences. In Vienna, from the 1870s onwards, Jews comprised some 30 per cent of all gymnasium (or academic secondary school) students, a very high proportion that may be equally well expressed by parallel fig­ ures for the total population: in 1881 0.6 per cent of all Viennese attended gymnasia, but

Table

2.2. Jewish population of Vienna and Budapest in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the cities’ total population 1784

No.

%

No.

230 — 290 — ——

Table

1838 No.

No.

%

1857 No.

%

1870

%

No.

1880 %

c.4,000 — 6217 2.16 — — — — — 44,747

— 2010 — —— —

No.

1890

— 72,588 10.06 16.6 70,277 19.7

%

No.

%

1900

%

No.

118,495 8.69 146,926 8.77 102,377 21.0 166,198 23.6

2.3. Jewish population of Warsaw and Lodz in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the cities’ total population 1781

Warsaw Lodz

1848

1808

1810

1857

1846

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

3,532 —

4.5 —

— 58

— 13.4

14,061 —

18.1 —

No.

%

44,149 26.7 — —

No.

1882

%

— — 2,886 11.7

1897

No.

%

No.

%

127,917 —

33.1 —

219,128 98,671

32.0 31.4

INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

Vienna Budapest

%

1806

DISJUNCTIONS

135

In the exceptional case of Bukovina they accounted for 44.2 per cent; and in the Staatsgymnasium of the capital city of Czernowitz, to which Jew­ ish students were first admitted in 1820, no less than 664 of a total stu­ dent body of870 by 1905 were Jews. The pattern in Austrian universities and technical colleges was similar: 641 students in 1851, 4,485 (15.6 per cent of the total student body) in 1904. The precise number ofJewish officers in the Austro-Hungarian armed forces is uncertain, but by the end of the century (when neither in Germany nor in Russia was it pos­ sible for a professing Jew to hold a commission at all) it was very prob­ ably over 2,000 in a total army and naval officer corps of 27,000. In all these cases, the indispensable condition of admission to the schools, institutions, and established professions of the major states ofwestern and central Europe was, of course, language. In multinational and multi­ lingual Austria-Hungary alone, by 1910, well over a quarter of the Jews of Cisleithania had acquired German at least as a working language (Umgangsprache). In the Hungarian domains of Transleithania, where the matter of language and national identity carried greater weight still, the mother tongue of57 per cent ofall Jews was Magyar as early as the 1880s.58 Finally, to these revolutionary and on the whole irreversible changes there need to be added the long-lasting effects of the discovery of new, distinctive, and in important respects incompatible interests between Jewry’s social classes. The older, eighteenth-century distinctions between the privileged and the non-privileged, the Schutzjuden and the fremde, the Portuguese and the Alsatians, the ‘useful’ and the ‘useless’ or the ‘non-productive’, between those with a seemingly firm foot in the general economy and those subsisting on its margins—all these survived. Rather than fading, they had been granted new life, taking on a sharper, less fluid, more permanent form by virtue of their being ever more firmly and visibly correlated with acculturation—orper contra with resistance to it. Material (commercial and political) pragmatism and opportunism would now be reinforced—and in the process transformed—by cultural loyalties, ambitions, and achievements. For those who considered that they had escaped from the ‘ghetto’, the horror of being dragged back into it, with huge consequent loss of status, rights, general welfare, and of course political freedom too, was likely to be compounded by fear lest a forced retreat from what had been accomplished bring in its wake a loss of linguistic, social, and cultural identity as well. 2.2 per cent of the total Jewish population of Vienna. Later, with the accelerated influx of eastern European Jews, the figure for Jewish students as a proportion of all Jews in Vienna was to fall: to 1.3 per cent in 1910. On the other hand, at the elite Theresianische Akademie the relative and absolute number ofJewish students was consistently very low indeed: 4 students (1.2 per cent of the student body) in 1881/2, 2 students (0.5 per cent) in 1910. See Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 103-6. 58 Bihl,‘Die Juden’, 924,944,905-7.

The drives towards religious reform and acculturation had it in common that each was compatible with a third impulsion, the drive to de­ nationalize Jewry: to reconceive and restructure the Jewish people as an exclusively religious denomination, in effect to remake it as a church. This, of course, was one of the principal charges the traditionalists laid against all programmes of reform. They could point to the fact that where there was no question of the Jews being seen by themselves or by anyone else in other than national terms—as, for different reasons, was the case in the Russian and the Ottoman Empires—there religious reform on the western (principally German) model was failing to take root. Observance and attendance might be less assiduous than before. A certain secular ten­ dency could be seen to be gathering strength. But observance and ritual remained in the old mould exclusively. Where, on the contrary, the de­ nationalization of the Jews was thought feasible and people of influence judged it necessary and desirable, there religious reform could be seen to flourish. Only where Germanization or Magyarization or whatever other form the de-nationalization of the Jews was expected to take was the order of the day, did a reworking of the Tradition seem to substantial, as opposed to entirely negligible, numbers to be indispensable. But while all this was true, as a reflection of the several broad directions in which European Jewry was moving, it was incomplete. For where insistence on renewal went hand in hand with an objection to total integration into other nations and a reluctance to jettison more of the baggage of the Tradition than proved to be absolutely necessary, there a search for an accommodation of another kind was in progress. It is at this point that the movement for haskalah (enlightenment) comes into its own, veering away from the movements for religious reform and social integration as strictly understood, but unalterably opposed to social and cultural stasis as well. The haskalah can best be understood as the (belated) analogue of the general European Enlightenment. The principal elements of the latter— rationalism, intellectualism, scepticism, humanism, huge suspicion of, if not contempt for, dogma and authority, a corresponding confidence in the power of the human mind to distinguish between false and true problems and, dismissing the former, to proceed to the solution ofthe latter—all these were to be found within it. In part, it was a function—or by-product—of the European Enlightenment in its specifically German manifestation, the Aufklärung. In part, especially in its early years, it represented a brave, to some extent forlorn, attempt by a handfril of scholarly Jews who had had access to the larger movement, and been much influenced by it, to construct a bridge between European civilization in its new, universalistic dress and that of the Jews. It was brave because they had in mind a bridge

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capable of carrying traffic in both directions. It was forlorn because the response on the other side of the divide was fated never to be greater than negligible. Still its deepest roots were internal: the slow, ultimately inexorable percolation of new ideas into segments ofJewish society which objective circumstances, private ambition, and great physical distance from the great east European heartland all permitted, when they did not actually require, a high degree of freedom of thought and action. All these combined to render a certain class of western and central European Jews, in Germany especially, both receptive to what was new and sufficiently independent intellectually and psychologically to allow their new convictions to begin to determine their private and public behaviour. What the haskalah had especially borrowed from the European Enlightenment proper was a mode of thought that subjected virtually all matters of contention to the test of universal quality, content, application, and significance. Its thrust was therefore towards the discounting of dif­ ferences, real or supposed, between nations, cultures, and, of course, reli­ gions as well. The European Enlightenment had tended therefore to neglect the specific and be drawn towards the secular. There were diffi­ culties about this for the adepts of the haskalah, the maskilim. Anxious to draw from the great store ofideas, attitudes, programmes, and techniques on which the doors of the Enlightenment proper had opened, they were never sure what they might decently adopt and apply to the largely her­ metic culture of the Jews themselves. Demoting Christianity from its pre­ viously unquestioned role in European culture as sole—certainly ultimate—source of moral truth, the Enlightenment had simultaneously inaugurated a fresh approach to Judaism, now susceptible of examination as one religion among others rather than, crudely as before, as the supreme enemy of the one which alone was true. And if, in some cases, the inquiry into Judaism was neutral or even friendly, in others it was fraught, as before, with hostility and contempt. Judaism, some would now argue, was trebly flawed: in that it was a religion, because it was (was it not?) a particularly absurd one, but, worst of all, and as strongest evi­ dence of its flaws, because it was the fons et origo of Christianity itself. Nothing in any of this was likely to trouble the orthodox in Jewry. Their moral and intellectual sustenance was drawn from sources of their own. But there was much in it to trouble those for whom the European Enlightenment had set the cultural and intellectual standards governing the corpus of ordered knowledge into which they sought to integrate their own scholarly findings and, more generally, in the world in which they wished in some sense to be included themselves. Voltaire had famously and contemptuously dismissed the ‘philosophy of the Hebrews’ as non-existent and the Jews themselves, ‘nos maîtres et nos ennemis’,59 as 59 Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (London, 1756), 1.

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INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

‘an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched*. He did add, magnanimously, that ‘Still, we ought not to burn them’,60 but the anguish with which the very early adherents of the Enlightenment in western Jewry responded was extreme. ‘Would it be just to impute responsibility for the torment of Charles I to the entire English nation or to all Frenchmen in Charles IX’s day responsibility for the St Bartholomew massacre?’ was the well-known protest of Isaac de Pinto of Amsterdam. Are there crimes for which an entire nation can be charged? All universal propositions, said Pinto, were ipsofacto suspect and liable to error, most especially when they referred to the general character of a nation and were subject necessarily to variations of station, rank, tem­ perament, and profession.61 But, in itself, the question how far it was proper and decent for Jews to go in Voltaire’s and others’ footsteps was unanswerable. The operative question was how far adherents of the haskalah might be willing to bring themselves to go. All believed that the cultural and intellectual heritage of the Jews was ripe for careful, rational, perhaps even radical, but certainly scientific-historical re-examination. None doubted that to some extent the tools had to be borrowed from the world outside. But they were wary. If the heritage was to be rethought, it was by no means to be diminished. Least of all was it to be reduced and distorted by a procrustean effort to shape it to an alien model. Eventually, the haskalah would prove to be not only an intellectual and academic enterprise, but, most notably of all perhaps, a literary one. In its early years, however, its most important and long-lasting manifestations were two: a most successful effort to draw fresh attention to the Hebrew language and the establishment of an entirely new model for Jewish scholarship and learning generally. Hebrew, to be sure, had never been a ‘dead’ language in the sense that Latin and classical Greek might be so rated. Apart from its being the language of daily prayer, of the Bible, and, with Aramaic, the language of the Jews’ sacred and essential legal texts, old and new, it had for centuries been the language of choice for written correspondence between Jews, especially, but not exclusively, between the learned among them. In the Middle Ages Hebrew had been the lan­ guage in which some of the finest poetry in the Jewish literary canon was written. True, it was not much spoken. And its employment for corres­ pondence on profane subjects (in commerce, for example) had begun to 60 Œuvres complètes, vii (Geneva, 1756), ch. 1, cited in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modem World: A Documentary History (New York and Oxford, 1980), 252-3. 61 Isaac de Pinto, Apologie pour la nation juive, ou reflexions critiques sur le premier chapitre du VII* tome des œuvres de M. de Voltaire au sujet des Juifs (Amsterdam, 1762), cited in J. S. Wijler, Isaac de Pinto, sa vie et ses œuvres (Apeldoorn, 1923), 45 ff.

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die out—not least in consequence of the freer entry of Jews into the gen­ eral commercial and industrial world and the objection of governments to the records and transactions ofJewish merchants, bankers, and so forth being kept in a form that rendered them inaccessible to official inspec­ tion. But this had to do with the latter-day traditionalists’ objection to the use of Hebrew for any purpose other than such as might be termed rab­ binic. Per contra, the move to foster wider employment of Hebrew was inseparable from the very earliest stirrings of secular nationalist feeling among Jews and the influence upon the maskilim of examples set by their neighbours. ‘The nations around us, far and near, [do] not cease and [do] not rest from making books without end’, wrote one of the forerunners of the haskalah, Mordechai Schnaber. ‘Everyone speaks and creates in the language of his people so as to broaden it; and why should we be deprived of the inheritance of our forefathers by forsaking our holy tongue? But indeed we are lazy.’62 The other direction in which the haskalah moved, initially much the more important one, was that of the new (because essentially secular) Jewish scholarship. This was the celebrated Wissenschaft desJudentums (the science or learning ofJudaism—or Jewry), conceived as a mighty effort to apply the highest standards of systematic, academic, and so far as pos­ sible objective (and therefore wissenschaftlich or ‘scientific’) research and analysis to all that pertained to the intellectual and cultural heritage of the Jews and—the most revolutionary step of all—their history as well. Its accomplishments were indeed to be considerable: Moses Mendelssohn’s biblical and philosophical work; the first serious Hebrew-language scholarly and literary periodical (the Ha-Me’assef quarterly established in 1783); the path-breaking ventures of Leopold Zunz (1794—1886) into close analysis of great parts of the Jewish literary corpus, but especially his inauguration of modern Jewish historiography; and the first, and in some ways still unsurpassed, work of comprehensive history by Heinrich Graetz (1817—91), his Geschichte derJuden intended as no less than, in the author’s own words, ‘a survey of the entire history of the Jewish nation’. These were among the peaks of an entire range of scholarly endeavour which would gather force and prestige among all Jews who were of a literate and a modernist turn of mind throughout the nineteenth century and beyond into the twentieth. Having regard for the sheer novelty of the enterprise and its deliberate departure from the old scholarly-rabbinical tradition, its importance for determining the direction Jewish scholarship would take from Mendelssohn’s day on can hardly be overstated. But the Wissenschaft des Judentums had social purposes as well. Its proponents believed that what they were about was the easing of the acceptance of Jewry and 62 Mordechai Schnaber, Ma’amar ha-tora ve-ha-hokhma (London, 1771), 5. Cited in Moshe Pelli, The Age of Haskalah (Leiden, 1979), 76-7.

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INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

Judaism by state and society, virtually in toto and more or less on their own terms. Once mediated in universal terms and categories, the exposition and transmission ofJewish learning, with everything, or almost every­ thing,63 being looked at with a fresh and critical (but not servile) eye, would unfailingly have a benign effect on the status of the Jews and on the approach to them all round. ‘Through larger intellectual culture and more thorough knowledge of their own affairs,’ wrote Leopold Zunz, the Jews would gain ‘a higher degree of recognition, and thus of rights’. Many of the failures to improve those rights, much of the prejudice against Jewish ancient history, and the condemnation of the Jews’ new aspirations, were he thought, no less than the direct result of the state in which, especially in Germany, Jewish literature and the study ofJudaism had fallen.64 Plainly, then, whatever their intentions, the purposes of the maskilim could not in all respects be compatible. Their desire to reanimate Hebrew and greatly extend its use as part of the more general intention of revivi­ fying all that could be usefully and successfully retrieved from the great storehouse of Jewish civilization was beyond question. Yet one of the telling characteristics of the new Jewish learning in its early years in Ger­ many (and elsewhere in the course of time) was that the greater part of its product was presented to the public not in Hebrew, but in the language of the country. The audience to which the Jewish Wissenschaftler addressed themselves in the' ever more numerous books, articles, and independent journals devoted to scholarly revision and analysis of texts, early attempts at chronological history, probing discussions of points in Jewish law, and the like, was at least as much the non-Jewish as the Jew­ ish, if indeed it was not the world of non-Jewish scholarship that was uppermost in their minds. Hebrew as a subject was one thing. Hebrew as a vehicle was another. The desire to normalize Jewish learning and schol­ arship, to make it available to a larger world, to demonstrate its intrinsic importance and value sub specie aeternitatis, to make it an integral part of humane learning as a whole, and, not least, to bring its own expert scholars shoulder to shoulder with their German (and, later, Russian) analogues both in terms of standards and, of course, repute—all these were central to the enterprise. It followed that there was more than enough in the haskalah to estab­ lish it as a movement whose internal logic and implicit purposes were secular, although some time would pass before its secular and—to borrow 63 A common question was how far to press the rule of free inquiry. Some, but not all, while having no objection to the Talmud and even the Bible in general being subjected to higher’ criticism and textual analysis drew back in the case of the Pentateuch. 64 Leopold Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge derJuden (Berlin, 1832), p. vii. Cited in Michael A. Meyer, ‘Jewish Religious Reform and Wissenschaft des Judentums’, LBIYB 16 (1971), 24.

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a term from the non-Jewish context—anticlerical style and drive would be explicit. But while the traditionalists were quick to grasp its inner sig­ nificance and to condemn it from the start, the general tendency among the maskilim themselves, at all events in the movement s early years, was to avoid collision. They tended equally to avoid an outright resolution of the consequent ambiguities in their own position. Their first foothold in the world they sought to penetrate owed a good deal therefore to the man whom they accepted as their primus inter pares having been able to position himself with great dexterity astride the divide between the Tradition and the rebellion against it as well as astride the cultural and intellectual divide between the Jews and their neighbours. Strictly speaking, the career of Moses Mendelssohn (1729—86) precedes the chronological bounds of this study. But his influence so greatly outlived the man himself that to most minds he remains the haskalah’s primary representative, if not supreme progenitor. Famously, he had been bold enough to lead a team of Jewish scholars in a translation of the Hebrew Bible into the German vernacular—his caution evident in his having the German text printed in Hebrew characters, however. That Mendelssohn frequented non-Jewish literary and scholarly circles of a liberal and deistic disposition in late eighteenth-century Berlin on a basis of intellectual and even social equality was in itself, of course, a remarkable tribute to his distinction as a philosopher in the then accepted academic mode. Indeed, his standing in fashionable intellectual circles in Berlin was strong enough for it to be proposed that he be elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The attempt failed, to be sure, his sponsors (and Mendelssohn himself) being reminded that no Jew was as yet sufficiently emancipated for such an election to be confirmed, as was required, by the king. But he remained at ease in non-Jewish society (despite a crippling deformity of the spine), thoroughly acculturated in German terms, and at the same time a stout defender of Judaism and of the Jews when necessary, a profoundly learned man by traditional Jewish standards, and, most remarkably of all in these circumstances, an orthodox, observant Jew to the end ofhis life.65 . In combination, these features were immensely rare at the time, leaving ‘Mendelssohn in retrospect as in some ways an ambiguous figure: an inter­ mediate between the old internal Jewish regime and the still imperfectly defined new. He favoured the inculcation of universal and civic values into Jews. But he was opposed to the requirement that citizens conform to a single set pattern or model of good citizenship. He believed it pos­ sible and legitimate for Jews to retain a measure of social distinctiveness 65 There is a view, held by Heinrich Heine among others, that in his heart of hearts Mendelssohn was a deist. This is disputed, but the least that may be said of the thesis is that it is not wholly improbable. For a briefdiscussion of the issue, see Pelli, Haskalah, 18 ff. and n. 63.

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INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

not only in the world of affairs, but even in the armed forces where, while he recognized the evident contradictions between the exigencies of mil­ itary service and the halakha, he took the view that they were soluble. On the other hand, if the demands of citizenship, when granted, were to prove irreconcilable with those of the halakha, why then, in Mendelssohn’s view, it was the Jew’s duty to remain faithful to the halakha after all.66 But, in general, he was optimistic and forward-looking, as may be seen in the role he played in a characteristically heated contemporary debate that turned on just those issues which were rapidly dividing the arch-traditionalists from even the most cautious and accommodating of early modernists. A halakhic rule—of great antiquity and of absolute textual clarity—lays down that the dead are not to be left unburied overnight.67 In February 1772, however, Duke Frederick, sovereign ruler ofMecklenburg Schwerin, was persuaded by one Olaf Gerhard Tychsen, professor of oriental languages at Bützow and Rostock, that an end should be put to this ‘inhuman’ practice on the grounds that the Jews, in their haste, might be burying the living. The duke ordered his Jewish subjects to institute a waiting period of three days.68 The Jewish community, placed under a compulsion to transgress the Law, appealed. So did the duke’s own cabinet which pressed him to reconsider his decision. Their argument was that the Jews were entitled to manage their own affairs according to their own laws and customs without interference, besides which, the rules prescribing the cleansing of the body prior to burial effectively eliminated the alleged danger of burial alive. The duke refused to with­ draw his decree, but did agree to the eliciting of an authoritative answer to the jurisprudential question whether the practice of almost immediate burial was indeed of central significance in the Jewish scheme of things. When the Jewish convert to Christianity to whom the ducal government addressed its inquiry asserted that it was not of great significance, the community in its distress asked for time to apply to experts who were of unquestioned repute and of its own choosing; and they were permitted to do so. They wrote to Mendelssohn and they sent a delegation to Rabbi Jacob Emden of Altona, a much older man than Mendelssohn (who, as it happens, had been Emden’s pupil) and was noted amongst other things for his protracted battle against the followers of Sabbetai Zevi and for his pitiless denunciation of all whom he suspected of harbouring residual attachment to that or any other form of (manifestly) false messianism. He was, however, a man of great independence of mind and many esteemed him as the foremost Talmudic scholar of the day in Germany: rabbinical 66 Miriam Bodian, ‘Ha-yazamim ha-yehudiim be-Berlin’, Zion, 49, 2 (1984), 179. 67 The Talmud. Sanhedrin 6: 5. 68 The account that follows relies chiefly on the late Professor Alexander Altmann’s meticulous Moses Mendelssohn (London, 1973), 288-95.

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authority personified. Emden agreed to consider the question, but was slow to formulate his ruling. Mendelssohn was quicker off the mark and, in the circumstances, more adroit. He took a practical and so to speak diplomatic Ene, preparing a carefully worded draft of a memorandum to be submitted by the community elders to the duke, written, as is worth noting, in just that proper German literary style of which he was a mas­ ter, but that none in Schwerin, and very few Jews anywhere else in Ger­ many at the time, could command. The duke was thanked for his attention to his subjects’ welfare. The terms of the formal conflict between his edict and relevant Jewish law as handed down from antiquity were restated. It was admitted that the actual biblical authority for the injunction was open to debate, but the fundamental assertion that it was rabbinical authority that was binding on the Jews in actual practice and that it was the Law as laid down by the rabbis to which the duke’s own estabEshed guarantees to his Jewish subjects appEed was firmly stated. The duke was assured that no burial ever took place until certainty of death had been established and that, in consequence, he had no cause for concern. However, to remove such doubt as might still linger, the Jewish community of Schwerin undertook in future to insist on a formal med­ ical death certificate being obtained prior to burial. Mendelssohn’s draft was gladly accepted and sent forward. The new arrangement proved sat­ isfactory to the duke. So far as he was concerned, the matter was closed. Not so, however, in its internal Jewish ramifications. Mendelssohn had attached a covering letter to his draft memorandum in which he explained that he had done what he could to help the good Jews of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, but that he could not see what the ori­ ginal fuss had been about. In the first place, they had their own, perfectly competent rabbi. Why had they not relied on him? Secondly, while the old rabbinical injunction on not deferring the burial of the dead (halanat ha-met) was clear enough, it was equaUy the case that the rabbis had always permitted delay under certain special circumstances. Had not these been special circumstances? Thirdly, the ancient rule against postponing burial had been formulated in an age when the dead were placed in caves and watched over for three fuU days. In more recent times, when, on the one hand, the practice was to bury them underground and, on the other hand, medical science had as yet no clear criterion for establishing death, there was surely something to be said in favour of the duke’s original edict after aU. For all these reasons, his own view was that if the duke should decide to stick to his original decision the community should acquiesce. There were several respects in which this was daring. Mendelssohn was suggesting that an established Talmudic injunction might be reconsidered in the light of changed historical (and topographical) circumstances. In so doing, he introduced into a classic halakhic dispute considerations that were logicaUy—given the rules by which Talmudic discourse

144

INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION

proceeded—extraneous. There was too an aspect of the Mendelssohnian argument that was in essence opportunistic since it had to do with how it would be most politic for the community to deal with a ducal edict. And then there was the reference to contemporary medical science. When Mendelssohn’s advice to the community was brought to Emden’s atten­ tion his sometime master was horrified. The older man dismissed the point about the very ancient practice of burial in caves as incorrect and in any case irrelevant. Equally irrelevant to his mind was what modern medical practitioners were or were not capable of establishing. The Torah had its solution for this, as for all other problems, and to it alone did one apply. What disturbed Emden most of all, however, was the fact that his former pupil had taken it upon himself to question the validity of ancient practice and an established ruling of the Sages. No less grave and impermissible was the example he had set: that ofJews being advised by one of their own to adjust, if not entirely abandon, an age-old custom founded, as all knew, on impeccable Talmudic authority. And to what purpose? In the interests of accommodation to the gentiles. Even as late as the end of the eighteenth century and on into the nine­ teenth, it was almost exclusively to their own people that religious and ideological leaders of Jewish orthodoxy, Emden and Hatam Sofer and their analogues among them, addressed themselves. Only in extreme cir­ cumstances, and then with great reluctance and foreboding and mostly under great public pressure and moral duress, did they undertake to speak to non-Jews on matters touching on the norms by which Jews were expected to govern themselves and live out their lives. Of what they con­ ceived to be the rationale underlying those norms they were still less inclined to speak. Partly, it was wariness of the danger of venturing on to terra incognita. But it appears to have had rather more to do with the fact that, by and large, they not only knew very little about the prevailing intellectual climate in which they might have to explain their position, but that they had little interest in whatever and whoever its constituents might be. And finally, as has already been suggested, they had been schooled in the belief (well founded, historically) that little was to be gained, and much damage might be incurred, by an attempt to articulate the foundations of the Law before an alien audience. Everything then, not least the fact that in any case few had an adequate command of the vernacular, bolstered their natural tendency to look inwards and to con­ cern themselves chiefly, even exclusively, with those of their followers and pupils who remained devoted to what they themselves stood for. There was, they thought, more than enough in the vast body ofJewish law and philosophy, and in the accumulated commentaries of some four score generations of scholars upon it, to occupy the brightest and busiest of minds. But the consequence of abstention from social action was that the perennial duty of intercession and direct representation of the

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organized community before rulers and their minions was one that genu­ inely scholarly Jews tended to forgo and leave to others. And the others, in this case, were most commonly lay people whose prominence, such as it was, stemmed from mundane sources. Thus, by default, the moral and intellectual defence ofJewry and Judaism perse was left to the profane to take up as best they were able; or worse, left without any defenders at all. Not the least of the early indicators of the changes of outlook, structure, and discourse that were about to sweep the Jews of Europe in the period with which this study deals was indeed the emergence of new, necessarily untested classes of champions. Some, as we shall see, would be revealed as immensely dedicated to the task and exceedingly impressive and articulate in its performance. But the more impressive and articulate they were, the more likely were their specifically religious beließ and philosophical opin­ ions to be at variance with those of the traditionalists. There was no know­ ing as yet what the cumulative impact of the new men upon the inner life of the people they sought to instruct and to speak for would amount to. All that they themselves had in common was that they were self-appointed. It would soon be clear, however, that they presented a challenge of an unprecedented kind to the moral and intellectual leaders of traditionalist Jewry and that while, until very late in the day, it was a challenge that would be declined, there could be no real meeting of minds between them. Taken together, then, the effects of half a century or so of movement on the matter of the Jews by most of the major and some of the minor states of Europe had been remarkable. It is true, and worth re-emphasizing, that this did not mean that the Jews had been accorded social equality or unimpeded access to all the professions or, in all parts, full and formal civil rights. Only France and Holland had gone so far as to grant their Jews unqualified legal, political emancipation. But progress of some kind in that general direction had been made everywhere and the changes that had been instituted were sufficiently real for there to be quite solid grounds for thinking—or fearing, depending upon ones point ofview— that further progress in much the same direction was, or would soon be, the order of the day. To this rough rule there were four exceptions worthy of attention. Two of these were the curious, if now intrinsically unimportant, exceptions of Spain and Portugal. There the decrees of total exclusion and expulsion promulgated at the end of the fifteenth century in Spain and extended to Portugal early in the sixteenth century were in force and maintained by the authorities as a matter that was beyond public dispute. There was the special, historically and politically instructive, but demographically marginal case of the States of the Church. And there was Russia.69 69 The Muslim-ruled territories of Turkey-in-Europe constitute a separate category that lies beyond the scope of this study, although as the Ottomans retreated, so the

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VI It needs to be recalled that Russia was a despotism in which the regula­ tion of the Jews as a nation apart was an established matter of principle. To the end of its time in 1917, the Autocracy would cleave conscien­ tiously to an approach to everything that touched upon Judaism as a faith and as a culture and upon the Jews as a people that, by the standards of its far from philo-Semitic western contemporaries, was archaic. Being, as already suggested, a policy fed by, indeed very largely founded upon, a fundamentally religious hostility, it was therefore particularly complacent and self-righteous. But it was shot through too with that tendency, com­ mon in Russia at all levels of society, to succumb to fear and contempt of all that was perceived as alien. Efforts to look afresh at existing rules for the treatment and regulation of the Jews and consider what their advan­ tages or otherwise to the state might be would recur. Occasions when some mitigation of their rigour was conceded would be registered. But in their fundamentals neither the underlying approach nor the policy that was its fruit were ever reversed. And if the ideas which informed the Autocracy in its dealings with its Jewish subjects were no better than commonplace, the consistency and tenacity with which it stuck to them remained remarkable. This is not to say that either the formulation or the implementation of state policy on the Jews was ever straightforward. Some at least of the practical effects, and even some of the explicit rules that elsewhere in Europe, notably in central Europe, had come to define ‘toleration’ (and even ‘emancipation’ in watered-down form), came to be operative in the course of time in Russia as well. While imperial Russia was a despotism it was in important respects, in the sense that not all was arbitrary, a Rechtsstaat. Land and inhabitants were chattels of its ruler; but the daily administration of things and people was carried out by an administrative bureaucracy, a police machinery, and in due course by a judicial system which tended increasingly over time to operate accord­ ing to established procedures and regulations. Nineteenth-century Romanov Russia was therefore somewhat closer kin to Hohenzollern Prussia and Habsburg Austria than to its nominal analogues Kajar Persia and Manchu China. However, while the ‘enlightened’ monarchies of central Europe, in so far as they were not already in retreat before the waves of liberalization and democratization and nationalism that were now besetting them, were at any rate on the defensive, the role the Autocracy had devised for itself, notably after the Napoleonic fiasco of 1812, was that of arch counter-revolutionary. Thus abroad and thus at home—at home above all. The notorious dependence of all classes in condition of the Jews underwent change and the important case of the Danubian Prin­ cipalities will, at a later stage, be integrated into the present discussion.

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Russia—not excluding the nobility and the higher reaches of the gov­ ernmental bureaucracy—on the personal will and favour of the Tsar con­ sistently tipped the effective balance of public opinion heavily in his favour and increased the weight of whatever particular and idiosyncratic views he himself might hold on matters of state and policy. And if this personal dominance of the social and political scene went far to ensure the rise and coalescence of countervailing, mosdy secret, circles, parties, juntas, cabals, and other kinds of subversive factions, it served greatly to under­ mine their prospect of achieving some success. The Decembrist rebellion of 1825 (on which more in the next chapter) sent an unforgettable shock through the autocratic system. But the relative ease with which it was crushed was the supreme illustration of the regime’s near-impregnability. Under Nicholas I the uncertainties that had marked the reign of Alexan­ der I—the alternating hopes and disappointments, the shifts from a benign mood to a near-tyrannical one and back again, the presence in the higher reaches of government of men of a genuine liberal disposition side by side with others who were devotees of the established autocratic system—would be forgotten, giving way to something clearer, more coherent, more consistent, but also grimmer. The central purpose of government would now be the re-formation of state and society by fiat, an army on its drill ground being the model: uniformed, disciplined, rationally organized, imbued with a single spirit and a single loyalty, and obedient to a single master. It was intended to be and was in fact ‘that prison with­ out leisure, that is called Russia (cette prison sans loisir, qu "on appelle la Russie)’ which the marquis de Custine famously examined and reported upon, a land, as this most observant of Frenchmen wrote, in which ‘the government dominates everything and invigorates nothing;. . . where a man has two coffins, the cradle and the tomb’; where ‘mothers have better reason to weep upon the birth of their children than upon their death’; and in which ‘one man alone in all the Empire has the right to a will, and therefore to a life of his own’.70 Summing up his achievements after a decade in office, Count S. S. Uvarov, Tsar Nicholas’s foremost ideologue and for sixteen years his min­ ister of education, considered what he viewed as ‘the rapid collapse in Europe of religious and civil institutions’ and ‘the general spread of destructive ideas’ and set out the ‘firm foundations’ on which he and his master believed the Russian fatherland needed to be established: It was necessary to gather into one whole the sacred remnants of Russian national­ ity and to fasten to them the anchor of our salvation. Fortunately, Russia had retained a warm faith in the sacred principles without which she cannot prosper, gain in strength, live. Sincerely and deeply attached to the church of his fathers, the Russian has of old considered it the guarantee of social and family happiness. 70 A. L. L., marquis de Custine, La Russie en 1839 (Paris, 1843), iv. 489, 418, 423.

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Without a love for the faith of its ancestors a people, as well as an individual, must perish. A Russian, devoted to his fatherland, will agree as little to the loss ofa single dogma ofour Orthodoxy as to the theft ofa single pearl from the Tsar’s crown. /Iwtocracy constituted the main condition ofthe political existence ofRussia. The Russian giant stands on it as the comerstone of his greatness. An innumerable majority of the subjects of Your Majesty feel this truth: they feel it in full measure although they are placed on different rungs of civil life and although they vary in education and in their relations to the government. The saving conviction that Russia lives and is protected by the spirit of a strong, humane, and enlightened autocracy must permeate popular education and develop with it. Together with these two national principles there is a third, no less important, no less powerful: nationality.7 ’

But while the theory might be that the Autocrat was the ruler of what was—or at any rate ought to be—an ethnic-Russian and RussianOrthodox state and that it was precisely therein that its distinctive merit lay, the indigestible fact was that the empire of the Romanovs was noth­ ing of the kind. It was multinational, multicultural, and multireligious. And as its rule was extended westwards, to the recognition of the plain facts of the case there had been added, as we have seen, a positive under­ taking to respect the integrity and to some extent the autonomy of the Tsar’s non-Russian and non-Orthodox subjects, provided only his polit­ ical authority as Autocrat was accepted. However, if the contradiction was there for all to see, it was not for that reason more tolerable. In the eyes of the Tsar and many of his chief functionaries it was not tolerable at all. It was notably intolerable in the case of the Jews, as we have seen. And it is in the light of what would now be this supremely self-regarding regime’s most serious and intrusive effort ever to correct the anomaly that the further evolution of Russian Jewry must be seen. This would not be the case primarily because of the actual impact of state policy on Jewish society, although the wounds it would leave would be deep and long-lasting. It was rather because it would be established, once and for all, that the direction taken by this vast network of communities would be contingent in great measure on its dialectical relationship with the Russian state. In the view of the Autocracy as Uvarov had defined it for the ruler, the Jews of Russia failed all three of the relevant tests. They were not Rus­ sians or even remotely kin to them. They were not Christians of any kind. And regardless of whether they paid lip-service to the Autocracy or not, the salient fact was that they were subject to it only incompletely. They maintained a working system of internal self-government of their own to which the state bureaucracy had no effective access, over which it had no influence to speak of, and which it was prudent, therefore, to regard with suspicion. The Russia to which the regime was striving was therefore * S. S. Uvarov, Desyatiletie ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniya 1833—43, 2-3. Cited by N. V. Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855 (Berkeley, 1967), 74—5. Emphases in the original.

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manifestly not one into which the Jews could be fitted. They were un­ acceptable as candidates for the service nobility. They could, at a pinch, be taken into the ranks of the army, but under no circumstances could they be allowed to enter the officer class. They could not, with the rarest of exceptions, be allowed to become landowners in their own right or mas­ ters of serfs. But nor could they themselves be enslaved. In a society con­ ceived, but also, for the most part, actually functioning as an immense pyramid of slaves who differed one from the other only in the degree of conditional liberty permitted them and in which the sole, wholly free spirit was, as Custine had so clearly seen, the man at the apex, their master the Tsar, the Jews could not be other than an exceedingly irritating anomaly. If they were ever to be integrated they had first to be transformed. All this was understood by Nicholas and his ministers; and it was indeed the transformation of the Jews that they intended, much as Derzhavin and his contemporaries had done a generation earlier. What they were slower to realize was that such a transformation would fail unless it extended beyond even such fundamental matters as religion, communal organization, culture, behaviour, and language. The Jews would have to accustom themselves to changes of ethos in matters so deeply ingrained in their tradition and their psyche as hardly ever to serve them as topics for discussion, let alone debate or open controversy. They would have to accept, for example, the notion that the Tsar ruled by divine right and spoke with god-like authority. In his first circular to regional officials in 1833, Uvarov had laid down that ‘Our common obligation consists in this, that the education of the people be conducted according to the supreme intention of our August Monarch, in the joint spirit of Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality’. Accordingly, he expected ‘every professor and teacher [to be] permeated by one and the same feeling of devotion to throne and fatherland, [and to] use all his resources to become a worthy tool of the government and earn its com­ plete confidence’.72 But nothing could be more remote from a scheme of things in which the central element was God’s Covenant with the People of Israel in its entirety, for whom to acquiesce in a political relationship con­ ceived in such terms was to accept a form of slavery that, being essentially blasphemous, was doubly repugnant. The ethos ofJewry had been deeply antithetical to slavery from the first. It was with the great escape from slavery in Egypt (mythical or otherwise) that the history of the Jewish people had always been held to have begun. As Lord Acton put it with great eloquence: In the midst of an invincible despotism, among paternal, military, and sacerdotal monarchies, the dawn rises with the deliverance of Israel out of bondage, and with the covenant which began their political, life. . . . They governed them­ selves without a central authority, a legislature, or a dominant priesthood; and 72 Ibid.

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this polity, which, under forms of primitive society, realised some aspirations of developed democracy, resisted for above three hundred years the constant peril of anarchy and subjugation.73

And while it was the case that slavery was not forbidden under ancient Jewish law, few sets of biblical prescriptions are clearer than those relating to the rights of slaves, to the corresponding obligations of masters towards them, and most specially to the masters duty to manumit his bondsmen after a fixed period—all of which were exceptional for their times. The contempt with which the biblical legislators regarded a Hebrew slave who none the less wished to remain enslaved to his master beyond the time laid down for his release is equally exceptional and perhaps clearest of all.74 Unlike the peasants of Russia, Poland, and the Ukraine—or indeed the peasants of any other part ofEurope in earlier times—the Jews, as has already been observed, had never been enserfed. However heavily the ruler or landowner pressed down upon them, formally they remained free men. So they were in fact, and so they thought of themselves. Where they found themselves bound in some way to an overlord—prince, bishop, landowner—they conceived the bond as a free (if unequal) con­ tract or simply the product of illegitimate duress. In the latter event, they would wait with greater or lesser patience for the evil to fade away or for an opportunity to shake it off, being, in this sense, much like a modern businessman subject to criminal extortion. If some were inclined to regret the onset and, more than anything, the likely further implications of emancipation, it was not because they looked back to what they per­ ceived as the warm and protected irresponsibility of bondage to benevo­ lent masters. Theirs was in no sense a view analogous to that of the old servant Firs in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard who thought the emanci­ pation of the serfs a disaster. They did not think of their long, undoubted exclusion from civil society as slavery at all. Here then was a further reason for Nicholas’s bureaucracy, as it moved ponderously but purposefully towards the realization of its goal of a faithful, docile, and homogeneous society, to attempt to do something about the Jews. The nub of the prob­ lem was that in the view of their political masters the only real and lasting cure for the Jews’ condition was the oldest of all—conversion and disper­ sal among the general population. What was unclear was how this was to be achieved. What techniques of social engineering were applicable and available? By what stages and at what speed was it best to proceed? What force was to be applied and at what targets precisely? Official Russia never doubted the propriety and even, to some extent, the benevolence of its 73 ‘Sir Erskine May’s “Democracy in Europe” ’ (1878), Essays on Freedom and Power (Boston, 1949), 132. ”* The biblical text (Exodus 21:6) prescribes for such a case the deliberately humiliat­ ing ceremony of nailing the slave’s earlobe to a doorpost to signify for all to see his indig­ nity and moral inferiority.

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ultimate intentions in respect of the Jews—at all events, the ordinary Jew­ ish man in the street, as we have seen. Nor did it much doubt the validity of its overall judgement upon Jewry and what it believed it knew ofJew­ ish laws, practices, and beliefs. It is this self-confidence, arrogance, and brutality ofmind that goes furthest to explain the fact that both the think­ ing behind its plans and the steps actually taken to realize them would be more ambitious and far-reaching than anything imagined, let alone achieved, anywhere else in Europe. Joseph II of Austria, for example, to whose ideas on the matter of the Jews those of Nicholas I bore some resemblance, and earlier rulers of Russia itself went no way so far. And yet, arrogance and brutality were not exclusively the rule in their handling of the problem. If, overall, the legacy of Nicholas’s reign for the Jews was an evil one, it was not entirely so; and there was one sphere in which the general effort to undermine the cohesion and integrity of Russian Jewry was pursued without recourse to force at all and less by fiat than in an effort to be cunning. Uvarov, in his role of minister of education rather than ideologist, was of all the major figures in Nicholas’s court the one most directly and per­ sonally concerned to push policy on the Jews forward. He had ideas. He had the talent to formulate them in such a manner as to gain their accept­ ance. In this respect his role was somewhat like that of Derzhavin under Nicholas’s father Paul and his elder brother Alexander. But Uvarov’s actual thoughts on, and approach to, the Jews differed from Derzhavin’s. They were less bilious, less suspicious, and were at one and the same time more liberal and more realistic. A further, more important difference between the two lay in the fact that it was Uvarov’s assignment (and opportunity) not merely to imagine and to design, but to operate the instrument, or so it was hoped in St Petersburg, that would do more than anything any one else could think of to precipitate that irreversible trans­ formation of the Jews the Autocracy had always had in mind. Under Nicholas and Uvarov the plan was to strike with great force, but also with deEberation in the sphere which all concerned, Jews and non-Jews, rec­ ognized as potentially decisive: education. It would do so, moreover, by enlisting the willing co-operation of at least some of the Jews themselves: the still very small, but now steadily growing, class ofJewish modernizers who, having failed to get very far on their own, would be glad to have the government (and its resources) behind them. These were ‘enlightened’ Jews, maskilim, who (at this stage) were still much under the influence of their more numerous, more distinguished, and far better entrenched ana­ logues in the west, notably in Germany. The German example was not one that could be followed in Russia, however, even in the realm of schooling. Except in places that were socially and geographically on the outer margins of the Pale—in Odessa, for example, or beyond it alto­ gether in Riga, namely where life was freer and commerce (in all senses

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of the term) unashamedly of more concern to people than spirit—the eastern European Jewish public was far too deeply traditionalist and so too instinctively hostile to what the maskilim represented to co-operate. And, by and large, they were too poor to sustain the institutions needed. A partial exception to this rule was Vilna, but then Vilna was unique among centres of Jewish population in the Russian domain, for many reasons. It was a fortress of the Tradition at its most rigorous intellectually. By the same token it was the greatest of all centres of opposition to the Hasidic movement. But since it was the Hasidim who of all traditionalist trends were most implacably and vociferously hostile to the haskalah, it happened that such voices as might be found to speak for a measure of careful tolerance of at least some aspects of the haskalah (the systematic study of the Hebrew language, for example) were likely to be found in Vilna. So while Vilna as the prime centre ofJewish learning and intellec­ tual and cultural activity in eastern Europe, a capital of sorts, was not in itself an especially free and liberal place, it was not one in which all were deaf a priori to all whose opinions differed from their own. There the maskilim had at least been able to make a very modest start. Elsewhere, they most commonly found themselves badly harassed, alienated, and lonely. And the triumph of the traditionalists over them was compounded by the Russian provincial governors and policemen, accustomed to the convenience of collaboration with the (orthodox) Jewish establishment on the basis of a common.interest in maintaining discipline among ordinary Jewish people, having little use for them either. Uvarov, how­ ever, wiser than the governors and policemen on the spot, grasped how they might serve his purposes: Jewish society in eastern Europe being so very heavily opposed to everything the haskalah stood for, the maskilim having almost nowhere to go in search of really decisive support within Russian Jewry itself, and the underlying thrust of their enterprise being change and modernization, the logic of their predicament might move them to take the historically unprecedented step of being receptive to what the state had to offer them. On the face of things it was not unreasonable on either side to think that they could make common cause. If eventually it was to prove an uncertain and ultimately an abortive alliance, that was because it had been based from the start on a fundamental misunderstanding. An early landmark along the road towards such co-operation was the decision taken in 1826, some years before Uvarov came on the scene, to subsidize the publication of a book, Te'uda be-Yisrael.7S The author, Itzhak Baer Levinsohn (1788—1860), one of the very first maskilim of note in Russia, argued for a new occupational structure for Jewry—more manual, especially agricultural labour, less trading—but, most especially, for a thorough revamping of the institutions and content of Jewish 75 Published in Vilna in 1828.

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education. He wanted Hebrew and major European languages taught systematically, the lower tier of the Jewish autonomous school system, the hadarim (literally ‘rooms’ which he called hadrei mavet (‘rooms of death’), done away with, proper schools run by qualified personnel estab­ lished, an end to corporal punishment, and in place of a curriculum that centred on the Talmud one that was altogether broader and in great part modern and secular. Neither the terms in which he condemned the existing system nor his recommendations for its reform were notably original. They followed lines that were already familiar outside Russia and which, in any event, would soon be part of the common currency of the haskalah movement within Russia as well. But for his time and his milieu they were shocking. Levinsohn had difficulty getting his book printed. When it was finally published the response, as expected, was for the most part violently hostile. But what was remarkable about the inci­ dent was that Levinsohn had appealed to the government for help and that, more remarkably still, it was decided in St Petersburg to reward him. A friendly gesture towards Jews of any kind from on high was rare enough for those to whom it was addressed to be encouraged, but the maskilim seem to have read into this small gesture a deal more sympathy for their cause than was warranted. Some went so far as to imagine that it would now be possible to persuade the Autocracy to establish an official, empire-wide consistory on something like the French model through which the religious and social affairs of the Jews would all be channelled and in which they themselves would play the dominant role. But, more than anything, they wanted to believe both that the Enlightenment held the key to their troubles and that it had indeed successfully penetrated Russia. Results similar to those they had witnessed in the west were now to be expected there too. In Levinsohn’s own fanciful language: All the nations of Europe, great and small, are [now] devoted to moral improve­ ment and seek man’s love regardless of his nation and religion. In some European lands the Jews have already been granted liberty; and in this country, in particular, in the kingdom of Russia, . . . from the day we came under its wings ... the kingdom has been swom to good and mercy and seeks with all its might and main to improve our name and condition and ensure our happiness and welfare.76

But the St Petersburg officialdom too was in error. An admittedly robust critique of the rabbinical establishment for its extreme narrowness of vision and the hugely obsolete methods by which it continued to instruct the young by an entirely loyal son of his people was read as an intentionally subversive, broadside attack on Judaism per se. Still, in the common failure to take each other’s true measure lay the germ of a form of co-operation that would prove useful to both sides. 76 Cited in E. Etkes, ‘Parashat ha-“haskalah mi-ta'am” ve-ha-temura be-ma‘amad tenu‘at ha-haskalah be-rusiya’, Zion, 43,3-4 (1978), 273-4.

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A second, much more substantial and lasting, landmark in the process whereby the state ventured to extend a cautious welcome to the services and enthusiasm of the maskilim, and the maskilim for their part were moved to welcome the support of the state, was the establishment in the 1840s of a network ofJewish primary and secondary schools crowned by two state-sponsored and state-maintained rabbinical seminaries. Jews had been admitted to Russian (state) schools and universities since the begin­ ning of the century, as we have seen. Few among them had the requisite preliminary academic qualifications to take advantage ofthe opportunity, however; and the social and doctrinal obstacles and objections to the acquisition ofsuch qualifications by submitting to a full course ofprimary and secondary education in an intensely Christian environment were immense. The numbers were therefore exceedingly small: not much over one hundred young Jewish people in all state academic secondary schools (gimnazii) in the early 1840s;77 less than two score in the universities. A major ambition of the maskilim was therefore to establish modern schools of their own which would open the path to further, higher education, but in which, none the less, the essentials ofJewish civilization (Bible, Talmud, Hebrew) would be properly taught in tandem with equally proper, up-to-date instruction in the sciences, modern European lan­ guages, mathematics, history, general literature, geography, and the Eke. There could, of course, be no greater threat to the traditionalists than this on every possible count: doctrine, the integrity of their own all but monopolistic system ofschooling, employment, social and moral author­ ity. The campaign against all such projects was therefore exceedingly vehement: threats of excommunication, verbal and physical harassment of potential pupils and their parents, denunciation before provincial gov­ ernors who, when faced with such disputes and such clamour tended, as already suggested, to side with their tried and true associates among the traditionalists. In the short term, the pool from which a student popula­ tion might be drawn was therefore not much larger than that formed by the maskilim themselves and their immediate sympathizers; and these, taken together, were too few and too scattered for more than a mere handful of schools to be even marginally viable. It was only when Uvarov perceived the use he might make of the maskilim s intense desire to set up modern, if still explicitly Jewish, schooling and when a Ger­ man rabbi, Dr Max Lilienthal, who had been invited to run a small German-language Jewish school in Riga in 1839, came briefly on stage 77 By 1863 the number had risen to 552 (or 3.1 per cent of the entire Russian sec­ ondary school student population of17,320. Yu. I. Gessen, Istoriya evreiskogo naroda v Rossii (revised edn., Moscow and Jerusalem, 1993), ii. 179. A fifth of the Jewish students attended school in Odessa alone (S. J. Zipperstein, ‘Jewish Enlightenment in Odessa: Cul­ tural Characteristics, 1794-1871’, JSS (Winter 1982), 19-36). Zipperstein (p. 29) gives a slightly different figure for the all-Russian Jewish student population.

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and to the minister’s attention, that matters changed and prospects brightened. The story of Lilienthal’s meetings with Uvarov, his official appoint­ ment as Russia’s first ‘learned Jew’ (uchënyi evrei) ,78 his services as Uvarov’s agent for the promotion of the minister’s ideas and plans among influen­ tial members of Russian Jewry, and his subsequent sudden, imperfectly explained decision to leave Russia for the greener fields of the United States is a staple of Russian Jewish historiography.79 Lilienthal was not a man of great scholarly attainments, although as a graduate of the Univer­ sity of Munich he was well above the ruck. He was very young, exceed­ ingly ambitious, and probably very vain; and besides having neither Russian nor Yiddish, he proved to be too insensitive (or too inexperi­ enced) to make useful and friendly contact with the Jewish notables he needed to work with if he was to get anywhere at all in so vast a com­ munity. It was not until Uvarov made Lilienthal a government official (almost certainly the first Jew to be formally incorporated into the bureaucracy) and made it absolutely clear to all concerned that he was determined to proceed to the establishment of an entire Jewish school system of (his and Lilienthal’s own) modern design that the clamour pre­ cipitated by his appointment died down somewhat. Even so, it was hard going. The rabbinical members of the commission of Jewish notables appointed to consider the Jewish content of the curriculum and under­ write its legitimacy rebelled and were first threatened with punishment and then ignored. Popular resistance was continuous and it was necessary to show that Lilienthal personally and schools, staff, and pupils all had the firm backing of the state (and its police) and that no interference would be tolerated. It took until 1847, three years after the law authorizing the establishment of the primary and secondary schools for the first such institutions to be established in Minsk and Vilna and for the rabbinical seminaries to be opened in Zhitomir and Vilna. Eight years later, when Jewish state schools had been established in almost every major town within the Pale, seventy institutions in all, the entire student body still numbered no more than r.2,500—a minute segment of the Jewish school-age population.80 And had it not been known that attendance at Uvarov’s schools provided a virtual guarantee of exemption from military

78 Lilienthal was succeeded by Leib (Leon) Mandelstamm, the first Jew to be admitted (in 1840) as a student to a Russian university. Mandelstamm himself had no successor in the Ministry of Education, but ‘learned Jews’ of lesser standing were regularly appointed by the Ministry of the Interior to advise its officials and provincial governors serving in the Pale of Settlement on matters concerning the customs, laws, and rituals of the Jews. 79 Admirably summed up in Etkes, ‘Parashat ha-“haskalah mi-ta‘am” and M. Stanis­ lawski, Tsar Nicholas I and theJews: The Transformation ofJewish Society in Russia 1825-1855 (Philadelphia, 1983), 69-96. 80 Gessen, Istoriya, 161; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 106.

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service it is more than probable that the schools’ population would have been smaller yet. In sum, the victory of the Jewish modernists was a limited one and the system Uvarov and his maskilim had devised would prove to be no more than a halfway house at best on the road to a truly lasting accommodation with modernity. The network of schools and the two rabbinical seminaries Uvarov had founded were closed in 1873. While they operated they contributed something to the consolidation of the Russian version of the haskalah movement itself in that they provided an institutional and economic base for some of its leading lights who were happy to serve as instructors, inculcating a hitherto unknown, because more liberal, form ofJudaism in their pupils, notably among the graduates of the rabbinical seminaries established in Vilna and Zhitomir. The only flaw in the system, so far as the more rigorously minded haskalah sectarians were concerned, was its appeal to private self-interest no less, if not more, than to concern for a Jewish national cultural revival. But in any case, as would be clear in the course of time, it was the more prestigious regular state gimnazii that attracted most young Jewish people in search of a formal academic edu­ cation. As for the government, it is likely that Uvarov’s eccentric reliance on volunteers, on persuasion, and on the goodwill ofat least part ofJewry was regarded, if not with displeasure, then at any rate with embarrass­ ment, heightened, to be sure, by the undeniable failure of the scheme. The numbers were always far too small for anyone to speak seriously of success. And the only conclusion to be drawn was that it was not in the nature of such a project as the provision of a special school system to con­ tribute anything of substance to the purposes in which the regime was really interested, the dismantling of the barriers to the Jews’ integration into the general population and their eventual absorption within it. In this matter of legislating and administering social change, the special taxes levied on the traditional dress of the Jews in 1839 and the total ban upon them promulgated in 1851 were more in character. And it was certainly the attention the regime was determined to pay, schools or no schools, to the key matters ofJewish self-government and to the regular conscription ofJews into the Russian army that were to leave the deeper marks on the fabric ofjewish life and society in the empire.

VII

The Autocracy had always greatly disliked what it saw, correctly, as a bar­ rier to its own unobstructed control of its Jewish subjects and the cor­ responding diminution of the individual Jew’s need for, and subordination to, its own institutions, among them the judiciary. It had long recognized in the local institution of communal self-rule, the kahal,

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a rival for the Jewish subject’s loyalty to the Autocracy and moral dependence on the state. It saw it as encapsulating—and, what was worse, promoting— that tendency among the Jews of which the 1804 Committee81 and all Russian administrators before and since complained: ‘Alienating them­ selves from general laws and the respect due them, they are part of the state organization in matters of police only, while in internal matters one may say that they remain outside of it.’82 The upshot was that all those in St Petersburg who gave any thought at all to the matter sought to do away with the kahal, some going so far as to employ the falsely benevolent, self­ serving, although not entirely unfounded, argument that it had destroyed the influence of the rabbis and ‘held the people in such servility [podobostrastiye] that the poor Jews, fearing revenge, dare not reveal how they secretly did wish to order their own lives’.83 But the rulers of Russia were perpetually torn between the desire to abolish the kahal outright and enjoy the administrative convenience of using it as a much more effective instrument of government over the Jews than any that they themselves could devise for ruling so difficult and recalcitrant a people. The negative considerations gained special force under Nicholas I and finally and formally the kahal was abolished in 1844.84 Some of the func­ tions that had previously been laid upon it by the state devolved on the regular police and municipal administrations—some completely, but some half-heartedly. The immensely important power to determine who was and who was not eligible for an internal passport or other necessary official papers was withdrawn, but only in part: to obtain them from the police or municipal authorities the Jewish subject needed a certificate of good conduct which it was the function of community officials to issue at their discretion. For while the kahal was abolished, the ‘community’ (obshchestvo)—ill-defined, but consisting essentially of the communal parnassim and constituted therefore on much the same basis as the kahal had been—remained the body through which the state chose to operate in the spheres that concerned it most. The rule by which the Jewish population was to be kept subject to the state’s control remained that of collective responsibility. To that end the duties of the community, despite the abolition of the kahal, were no more than marginally respecified. In some respects they were rendered more onerous and the defacto powers

81 See above, pp. 93-5. 82 N. N. Golitsyn, Istoriya russkago zakonodatel'stva o evreiakh 1649-1825 (St Peters­ burg, 1886), p. 436. Cited in I. Levitats, TheJewish Community in Russia, 1772-1844 (New York, 1943), 31. 83 Count Kisselev, chairman of the committee on Jewish affairs to Vorontsov, governor-general of New Russia and Bessarabia, 13 Feb. 1841 (OS). Cited in A. Shohat, ‘Ha-hanhaga bi-kehilot rusiya 'im bitul ha-“kahal” Zion, 43, 3-4 (1977), 156 n. 28. 84 Stricdy speaking, the decree of 1844 did no more than implement a law providing for the abolition ofJewish self-government that had been promulgated in 1786.

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they required to perform those duties were substantially increased.85 In sum, while continuing to object as a matter of principle to the Jews hav­ ing semi-autonomous instruments of communal government of their own the Autocracy continued to rely upon them to do its will in all realms to which it attached some importance. Of these the most notable, not least because they impinged directly on the Jewish man and woman in the street, were taxation and military service. For fiscal purposes Jewish communities had long been held to be coherent and separate units. The taxes laid upon them were different in kind from those laid upon other subjects of the empire and, generally speaking, heavier. The original justification for such differentiation was the community’s need to maintain its institutions, pay its functionaries, and provide for charitable services of its own. As a corollary and to some extent as a concession, the task of collecting taxes was left to the commu­ nity itself. It had never worked well or fairly, however. Certain classes of Jews were exempt from taxation by virtue of their economic standing. The communities’ control over the use made of the money they collected diminished in the course of time in favour of the central government. The impoverishment of Russo-Polish Jewry steadily reduced the Jews’ cap­ acity to sustain the economic burden the state laid upon them. And the result was that tax arrears mounted steadily: it has been calculated that by the mid-1830s arrears in four of Russia’s western provinces had reached the equivalent of a two-year levy.86 As for social justice, the broad result was a system in which those who were best able to pay taxes were entrusted with the duty and power to extract them from those least able to do so. But it was the decision to conscript Jews into the Russian army that more than any other governmental measure affecting Jews during Nicholas’s long rule served to mark it in their minds. Jews had not been called up previously. The conventional wisdom—throughout Europe, of course—was that Jewish menfolk were a feeble, cowardly, and untrust­ worthy lot—therefore useless to the army, perhaps even damaging to it if ever admitted to its ranks. But to Nicholas this blanket exemption was unacceptable; and, given his belief in the unique merits and uses of mili­ tary service in the general effort to homogenize and discipline his sub­ jects, his objection to it was doubly unyielding. Ostensibly, what would now be enacted in Russia was a measure, the formal rationale of which was comparable to what had long since been established thinking in France, Prussia, and the Habsburg Empire: that the Jews both deserved and owed the state equal treatment; and equal treatment in this sphere particularly would benefit the Jews as a class and hasten their emancipation and integration into society at large. But if the conditions 85 All meticulously discussed and analysed in Shohat, ‘Ha-hanhaga bi-kehilot rusiya’. 86 Levitate, TheJewish Community, 56.

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of service in the ranks of all early nineteenth-century armies were harsh, those of the Russian army were notably so. And the terms under which Jews were to be recruited were uniquely and peculiarly cruel even by Russian standards. It was laid down (on 26 August 1827), that Jews would be conscripted on the same proportionate basis as all other subjects: so many young, single males per thousand,87 and for the same period of twenty-five years. But it was further enacted that in the Jews’ case specif­ ically the minimal age would fall from the usual 18 or 20 to 12. The boys were to be separated from the men. Their service would be passed in the special, so-called cantonist, youth battalions before posting to regular military units upon their reaching their majority. Their full twenty-fiveyear term of military service would then begin in earnest. It is true that there were other categories of child recruits to the Russian armed forces, much as there were (drummer and bugle boys and naval midshipmen, for example) in other European armies and navies. What was peculiar to Russia was the recruitment of boys as a punitive or, in the best of cases, as a social measure. The ranks of the cantonist battalions were filled with abandoned children, the sons of political and common law prisoners, and young offenders. Even so, there were at least four ways in which the decision to incorporate Jewish children into these battalions was exceptional. In no other case was the cantonist format applied— applied compulsorily, it needs to be said—to an entire ethnically (i.e. not criminally or politically) defined segment of the population. The pur­ pose was devoid of military significance or calculation. It was not con­ ceived of as punitive. And the chosen instrument on which the duty to implement it devolved (along with the recruitment of able-bodied young adults in the normal way as well) was the Jewish community itself. The elders of each community were informed of the quota for the year. It was then their function and their responsibility, by no means that of the army or the police or the civil authorities, both to select the recruits and to deliver them bodily to the military authorities. Long-term military service in the Russian army was contemplated with horror and fear by almost all subjects of the Tsar. ‘The peasants treated induction as a sentence of death’, writes Richard Pipes.88 But it paled before the particular horror with which a parent—or any other decent person89—was likely to contemplate the fate of a Jewish child so 87 The precise number varied from year to year, k could be as low as four. It seems never to have reached ten. 88 R. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (New York, 1974), 150. 89 There is a famous passage in which Alexander Herzen, in his memoirs, recounts his seeing a convoy ofjewish boys, ‘little fellows of eight and ten’ being marched to Kazan to serve in a cantonist battalion, ‘sick children, uncared for and uncomforted, exposed to the wind which blows straight from the Arctic sea,... marching to their graves’ (Byloe i Dumy (Leningrad, 1946), 124).

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unlucky as to be pressed into service in a cantonist battalion. There is abundant evidence of the extraordinary harshness of the demands made on the children (who in practice, and in crass violation of the rules, were as likely as not to be substantially younger than 12 years of age), of beatings for the slightest of offences, of filthy quarters, inadequate food, an exceedingly high mortality and sickness rate, frequent (in many cases invariable) refusal to allow them the performance of their religious duties (despite the formal requirement to permit it), and the consistent pres­ sure—physical pressure for the most part—to submit to baptism. Beyond the immediate cruelty ofthe system and the manner in which the law was implemented, there was too the intense and unremitting pain suffered by all Jews in the Russian army, young men no less than children, even when, as was frequently the case, they did finally succumb and agree to baptism. They found themselves isolated in an alien and hostile society. Contact with other Jews in their place of service was made deliberately difficult or in fact virtually impossible (when the posting was to places outside the Pale of Settlement). The consequence of long military service was therefore always a degree ofpsychic confusion, and often total loss of social identity. To have been recruited for twenty-five years (in some cases twenty years, in the case of the cantonists many more) was to be torn from family and people, very likely never to return. That was how all understood it. So, with fairly rare exceptions, it turned out to be. ‘I shall not describe my meeting with my mother, my brother, my sisters and with others of my relatives who were still alive’, wrote a certain Ilya Isayevich Itskovich, sent to a cantonist battalion at the age of 7 (!) in 1853, but lucky enough to see his family again nineteen years later. ‘They had long since buried me; and even I did not believe that I would emerge alive from the cantonist [battalions].’90 But therein, of course, lay the rationale of the scheme and its attraction for the regime. While there are no fully reliable and precise figures, there is sufficient evidence to show that the majority of Jews recruited during Nicholas’s thirty-year reign were indeed minors, that their number did not fall far short of50,000 and may have been higher, that half or more of them were induced to apostatize, and that one way or another it was the cantonist system specifically that accounts for most of the cases ofJews converting to Russian Orthodoxy in the course of the nineteenth century.91 These were not numbers that could have been attained in any other way, the more so as the social class most grievously touched was the one that was otherwise least penetrable by the cultural and religious agents of the Russian state. But the cantonist system of boy recruitment ate into foundations of 90 I. I. Itskovich, ‘Vospominaniya arkhangel’skago kantonista’, Evreiskaya Stanna, 5 (1912), 63-4. 91 Sumter,Judentaufen, 40-2, 72-3; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 22-5.

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Russian Jewry in more subtle ways as well. It created a small, but not insignificant, class of Jews who, while remaining technically of their ancestral faith and people, had grown away from both. Their language, and to some extent their ways as well, were now Russian. Even those who had managed secretly or even openly to stick to their Judaism, were likely to have acquired an outlook that was loosely secular or marginally receptive to Christianity—having been exposed to it for so long—in ways that to other Jews were normally foreign. That they had been soldiers—rarest of all occupations for a traditionalist Jew—set them still further apart from their original class and brought them closer to gentiles. Privileged upon release to live outside the Pale of Settlement, and there­ fore in conditions of tenuous ties to a Jewish community, or no ties at all, it is not surprising that many chose to do so. Still, the deepest wound upon the body politic of Russian Jewry delivered by the cantonist sys­ tem—and indeed by the military recruitment system generally—was to the cohesion of the communities themselves and to the fabric of trust and obligation on which its cohesion and integrity necessarily depended. The initial, instinctive Jewish perception of the plan to recruit Jews into the army was that of a new, if especially monstrous gzeira. There­ upon, in traditional style, great efforts were made by Jewish notables to induce officials at the highest level of government (by argument if pos­ sible, by massive bribery if necessary) to scuttle it, or water it down in some way, or at least delay its promulgation.92 They failed. The emperor was adamant. But the deeper and far bitterer failure was internal. That the hatred and fear of what might be in store for their loved ones would lead people to be willing to do anything to allow their sons and brothers to escape the levy was inevitable. That the authorities were not much con­ cerned (or could easily be deflected from noticing) whether the very loose rules that were supposed to ensure equitable treatment of all were observed in practice was equally inevitable. That certain social and occu­ pational categories were totally exempt from service (rabbis, guild mer­ chants, students at government schools, for example) meant that the burden tended to fall disproportionately on the poor and the ill-educated in all circumstances. And that those who were well placed economically and socially were better able to evade service where they were liable for it was bound further to exacerbate the inequalities: the difference between those who could raise bribe money, pay for a substitute (who had to be another Jew, however), or be informed of the movements of the commu­ nal press-gang in time to take their son to safety and those who could manage none of these things was of course crucial. On the other hand, the powers granted the communal officials to facilitate their task and 92 S. Dubnov, ‘Kak byla wedena rekrutskaya povinnost' dlya evreev v 1827 g.’, Evreiskaya Starina, 2 (1909), 256-65.

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generally to impose their will were immense. The law provided that ‘the community may at any time draft by verdict any Jew who is guilty of irregularity in the payment of his taxes, or of vagrancy, or of any offence not tolerated by the community’.93 And since the punishment the state was prepared to mete out to the communal officials themselves should they fail in their duty to deliver the quota set them (or to any one at all who interfered with the relevant procedures) could be severe—heavy fines, Siberian exile, penal servitude, or their own induction into the army—those who assumed the task and the power tended very strongly to use it. It was an evil system. None thought otherwise. Some ended by being resigned to the evil. ‘It stands to reason [samo soboyu razumeetsya]’ wrote Ilya Isayevich Itskovich, ‘that among the Jews, as among the other peoples in Russia, the rich or the educated did what they could to avoid the recruitment of their children.’94 Some rebelled. In some communities the elders went out of their way to avoid the office. Here and there, a braver rabbi than most stood up publicly and denounced those who had assumed it. Very occasionally, courageous spirits at the very bottom of the social ladder submitted complaints of favouritism to the authorities despite the vengeance likely to be exacted of them from above. And, unusually for the Jews in their exile, there was some violence. Commu­ nal officials were beaten or stoned. Press-gangs were forced to release their victims. Convoys were ambushed and recruits freed. How wide­ spread such resistance may have been has not been established. The evi­ dence is almost entirely anecdotal. By the standards to which periodic peasant rebellions had accustomed successive Russian governments it was certainly negligible. And while the authorities seem to have expected some trouble, they were unconcerned by the prospect: Jews were known to be too cowed a people to mutiny.95 It is, indeed, the fact that there was any resistance at all that deserves attention. It suggests the beginning of a change of mood in Russian Jewry, some loss of ancient patience, a certain deep disquiet, evidence that there was a point beyond which these people could no longer be pushed and punished either by the state or—most especially—by their own leaders without their ancient docility being subject to evaporation. But, in general, the fact was that one class ofJews had been set to hound another and that, exceptions apart and despite mis­ givings in many cases, one cannot speak of a coherent, let alone a wide­ spread, attempt to avoid the duty or so much as seriously consider doing 93 Levitats, TheJewish Community, 60. 94 Itskovich, ‘Vospominaniya’, 54. 95 Shohat, ‘Ha-hanhaga bi-kehilot rusiya’, 181—4 and passim; E. Tcherikower, ‘Hehamon ha-yehudi, ha-maskilim ve-ha-memshala bi-mei Nikolai I’, Zion, 4, 2 (1939), 150-69; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 127—37. For an apologia on behalf of the mostly silent and embarrassed orthodox rabbinate, see Ya'akov Halevi Lifshitz, Zikhron ya'akov: historiya yehudit be-rusiya u-folin, i (2nd edn., Benei Berak, 1968), 106-17.

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so. In a society in which internal class distinctions had always been fluid, differences of status, privilege, means, and power would now be tight­ ened, consolidated, and exposed as never before for all to see, and for all to reflect upon. Few phenomena in living memory, if any at all, were so corruptive of Jewish society as the duty laid upon communal elders first to select and then to deliver—by force if necessary—the quota of recruits that had been laid upon them. There would be nothing like it anywhere else in Europe for a century to come. The scars left by the rekrutchina were therefore to be lasting.96 It destroyed what was left of the moral authority of the kahal and its lineal successors. It did much to introduce into the public life and the private calculations of Russian Jews the socially destructive, heretofore largely alien, principle of sauve qui peut. It contributed to the growing class of semi- or entirely secularized Jews, barely represented until now in east­ ern Europe. And all this, it is to be noted in final analysis, was the work, directly and indirectly, of the state. It was the state that had resolved to employ the organized community in a purpose and in a manner that could not fail to be both destructive and corruptive ofit. At the same time the effect was paradoxical. The uses ofthe community as an effective sub­ contracting intermediary between the state and the Jewish public was reduced. The public itself was rendered somewhat more self-reliant, not less, somewhat less docile, not more. And as a class, so far as the Jews of the empire were concerned there was to be less question than ever of their taking the place for which they had been designated in Nicholas’s parade-ground society. The age of Jews as rebels and insurgents was about to begin.

VIII

What was in process of being lost in the course of the post-Napoleonic years was consensus. None of the slowly consolidating new schools of thought was equipped socially and intellectually, nor perhaps psycho­ logically, to formulate a view of the modern matter of Jewry that was at one and the same time fresh, comprehensive, and acceptable beyond the circle in which it had originated. The traditionalists, while manifestly losing ground, were capable of responding to the threat—or reality—of change only by rearguard action and general denunciation of anything that smacked of innovation, reappraisal, or an impairment of established sources of authority. There was no question of their retaking ground. The process of erosion that had overtaken them at the outer margins of 96 The forced recruitment of minors was abolished shortly after Alexander H’s acces­ sion to the throne in 1855. There was no recruitment at all between 1856 and 1863.

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the heartland of European Jewry, namely in western, northern, and southern Europe, in the great cities of central Europe, and in such small modernist communities as had been permitted ad hoc to drop anchor and perpetuate themselves just outside the limits of the Russo-Polish Pale of Settlement, was proceeding too rapidly to be arrested. And if within the eastern European heartland itself the mass of Jewry was held firm for the time being, it was none the less the case that steadily expanding chinks of alien light were plainly visible and that moderate de facto and, so to speak, technical and external bits and pieces of compromise on a strictly private, individual, often shamefaced basis were ever more common: beards shaven off, dress changed, heads uncovered as people went about their daily business, and multiple concessions made to the ever more pressing need for secular, theologically neutral learning. Thus at all events in the middle and educated classes, most notably of all with deepest consequences among those who, within Russian Jewry, would form the analogue to the Russian intelligentsia. Where, on the other hand, innovation was positively favoured, where emancipation and the connected challenges of integration and accultur­ ation were the rage—there, of course, the logic of the situation did not call for thoughts on a comprehensive reconstitution of the Jewish people and its governing ethos at all. There everything pointed if not to the definitive dissolution ofJewry, at all events to a reworking of the Jews’ nature, quality, and status to accord with what was likely to be acceptable to the societies in which the Jews were embedded. Some would now argue that Jews were to be regarded primarily, even exclusively, as mem­ bers of a religious denomination; that they needed so to reshape them­ selves that they were no more (if admittedly no less) distinguishable from their non-Jewish fellow citizens than Protestants of one kind were distin­ guishable from Protestants of another kind, and all Protestants taken together from Roman Catholics. Others took the view, steadily gather­ ing force, but its implications still imperfectly understood, that the Jews were now, or ought now to be, divided permanently according to the political nations to which geography, history, diplomacy, sheer chance, and, in some cases, private preference had assigned them. Had there not always been a loose identification ofJewish communities with the land in which they found themselves? Was it not the case, over time, that quite distinctive communal traditions of one kind or another—each with read­ ily identifiable linguistic, occupational, culinary, and to a moderate extent even ritual components—had evolved? It might be true, it would be argued, that ultimate social and political loyalties had once been owed to the Jewish nation and not, except in a limited and pragmatic way and on a contractual basis, so to speak, to the ruler of the land in question, still less to the nation, if such there was, over which he or she actually ruled. But that was in the past and in very different circumstances. The issue of

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political loyalty in the modern sense could no longer be avoided. Napoleon’s commissioners had put it plainly to the Assembly of Jewish Notables in Paris in 1806 and the notables’ response had been equally clear-cut. They were Frenchmen now, much, so they said, as the Jews in England were Englishmen. Could it be otherwise elsewhere? This was another genie that could under no circumstances be put back into its bottle. The fragmentation of Jewry and Jewish opinion was the deeper for there being no machinery for continent-wide deliberation on what had occurred and what might be in store. That there was no authority cap­ able of establishing a compelling and binding ruling for all was not new. What was new, or relatively so, was that this was a condition for which there were no ancestral precedents to evoke and rely upon. The terms and general spirit in which Jews in the course of their exile had been accus­ tomed to debate and determine how it might be wisest to approach a new and unfamiliar ruler, for example, or respond to a threat of fresh pro­ scriptions, or weigh the balance of advantages and disadvantages where an offer of privileges was conditional on specific obligations—none of these offered guidance. A hundred different answers to the intercon­ nected questions of what was right and what was politic to do in present circumstances were on offer. But the central, fatefill characteristic of the era ushered in by the Enlightenment, the Great French Revolution, the final partition of Poland, and the first stirrings of political nationalism in all parts, was that the Jews were now irreparably divided in their social purposes, privately and as groups. External constraints and a deeply inter­ nalized low profile had long since rendered them incapable of effective concerted action. But if unity of action had been beyond their capability, they had, by and large, enjoyed the minor benefit of unity of opinion and approach. That unity was crumbling.

3 Questions from Without and Within i

its modern, secular, and political form the notion that the Jews, collectively, presented a threat to the other European peoples was in the main the invention of men of letters—scholars, philosophers, publicists—and serious political dissidents. So was its corollary: that the role the Jews played in society and in the economy was at once an acutely representative symbol of the times and one of its governing factors. In certain interesting ways the idea had roots in ancient, especially Christian, theses and sentiment. In other ways it constituted a departure from them, reflecting changes in social and political conditions at all levels of Euro­ pean society and the common thinking on public affairs. However, the rapidity and avidity with which it was taken up and propagated cannot be fully accounted for except in the light of the advance of the process of Jewish emancipation and of its twin, the admittedly incomplete, but still noticeable and continuing integration of the Jews in society at large. Such was the case where emancipation had been decreed and embarked upon. Such too was the case where it was contemplated from afar and denied. Some of the early formulations of the conceit dated from just before the collapse of the ancien régime, elements being present in the minds both of those who had decreed measures of emancipation and those who had sought actively to obstruct it, the entire process, as we have seen, being shot through therefore with reservations and internal contradictions. Still, in its full and explicit form it remained fundamentally incompatible with the general thinking of the effective social and political leaders of the western and central (as opposed to the eastern) states of nineteenth­ century Europe whose principal concern, as always, lay elsewhere: the preservation of the structures of government and the established order. The incumbent rulers, administrators, and bureaucrats were not immune to new ideas of this or any other kind. But they tended to absorb them, if at all, with something less than clarity and without translating them firmly and confidently into current policy. Most retained a certain basic loyalty to their predecessors, the men of the Enlightenment who had first allowed Jews to tiptoe into the socio-political space from which they had been excluded in the past. All were at one with their fathers at least in their dirigiste and self-confident approach to matters social and political, unafraid of what the Jews themselves might make of their new possibilities n

I

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provided they themselves were not faced with too many disturbing or even merely irritating contradictions. Of this school Metternich, for all that he was the supreme champion of the post-Napoleonic order in his role as defender of whatever could be salvaged from the pre-revolutionary age, was as good a representative as any. He did not hesitate to maintain good relations with Jews when he found it interesting or profitable to do so. He rarely gave overt expression to anti-Jewish sentiments. He had (as his wife’s journal tells us) as little difficulty meeting the Vienna Rothschilds on what was virtually a basis of social equality as in making sure that they contributed substantially to his system. At the Congress of Vienna, he had joined the Prussian minis­ ter Hardenberg in taking a largely sympathetic line on the Jewish ques­ tion, at any rate in so far as their situation in the Hansa cities and certain other German towns were concerned. And he lent something of his influence—measured out in teaspoons, to be sure—in the furtherance of other Jewish causes, that of the Damascus affair (of which more later), for example. He was consistent, however, in his cleaving to the status quo. For the mass ofJews in Austria itself he would do nothing and was explicit on the subject. Joseph H’s Toleranzpatent was still ‘en pleine vigueur’, at any rate in the German parts of Austria: the schools were open to, and attended by, numerous Jewish children; Jews served in the army on a basis of equality with others and could rise to all ranks including staff appoint­ ments. Except for such very special cases as the orders of chivalry, admis­ sion to which required specifically Christian oaths, no position, title, or office was now denied them. The measured terms of the memorandum ‘Über die Judenfrage in Oesterreich’ prepared for the international con­ ference at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818 in which all this was laid out set the balance as he understood it and was determined to maintain it. So on the one hand it was the case, he argued, that ‘those [Jews] who had most dis­ tinguished themselves by their civic virtues and their honourable condi­ tion had gone so far as to acquire titles of nobility which put them on an equal footing with Christian noblemen’. On the other hand, certain ‘measures of precaution’ had to be taken ‘in view of the abusive advan­ tage Jews had taken of the concessions made to them. Devoted to trade, generation after generation, supporting one another with immense cap­ ital resources, they prefer to seek profit in legal or illegal commerce rather than by means that would require of them greater attention and effort.’1 In none of this was there any real deviation from the spirit that had informed the carefully limited reforms initiated a generation earlier. Metternich’s language, being self-congratulatory, can irritate. But his carefully indirect reference to the evolving difference for the Jews ’ Aus Metternich's nachgelassenen Papieren, ed. Richard Metternich-Winneburg, iii (Vienna, 1881), 181-2.

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themselves between the admittedly very mildly liberal approach of the Habsburgs and the consistent hostility displayed them by the Romanovs was not without merit: ‘The laws of the Emperor Joseph had led to one very real benefit exemplified ... in the difference between the Jews of [Austrian-ruled] Galicia and those of the old Poland.’2 Still, while it was indeed the case, that within the Habsburg Empire the forces generated by the original emancipatory approach could not now be entirely arrested even where there was the will to do so, it was equally the case that, in the course of maintaining the Metternichian balance, the rate of progress—manifestly, a linear form of progress—had been lowered. Some of the specifics of the original Austrian Toleranzpatent had been approached very gingerly horn the start. Some were abandoned almost immediately. The plan to bring Jews fully into the general school system was dropped on the stated grounds that the benefit Jewish chil­ dren would derive from access to it would be offset by the harm done Christian children by their having been brought into close contact with Jews. When in 1816, moved by the not unreasonable belief that the postNapoleonic reaction was sure to soften, the leaders of the Jewish com­ munity of Vienna asked for an easing of the framework of restrictions by which all the Jews of the empire continued to be bound, they were sys­ tematically put off. It availed them nothing that they had drafted their petition in the servile terms custom still dictated. Nor had the ostensibly countervailing fact that the content of their memorandum was compara­ tively bold done them any good either. Did not Jews and Christians pray to the same god, they asked, the former relying on the Old Testament, the latter on the New? Was it not the true function of government to establish (equal) civil rights and obligations for all the emperor’s subjects? Was it not unjust and anomalous for a people that had been settled in the lands of the Habsburgs for eight centuries to be denied rights freely accorded to absolute foreigners? If it was the case that not all Jews met the standards required of them, did not the source of the evil lie in the system of segregation and discrimination imposed upon them? Was it not known that none of those states that had followed the example of the pre­ sent emperor’s illustrious predecessor but one (Joseph II) and had then gone further and accorded their Jewish citizens füll rights regretted doing so? And was it not understood that if their petition was rejected and envy and ancient prejudices did triumph over experience, truth and ti e loud voice of the present century; and if indeed the [Jews] of the empire are fated to be regarded in the future [as in the past] as worse than the helots in ancient Sparta . . . then those of the religion of Moses inhabit­ ing his imperial majesty’s fortunate lands will see themselves and themselves

- Aus Metternich’s nachgelassenen Papieren, 181-2.

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alone as abandoned to sacrifice and despair and fated by their very existence to be a burden both to themselves and to the state?

But two full years passed before their case was so much as brought up for serious discussion in official Vienna; and even then it was only when a further petition (26 February 1818) reminded the bureaucracy that an explicit promise to abolish discriminatory legislation had been made in 1787, thirty-one years earlier, by the emperor himself. This piece of impertinence was then softened slightly by the admission that no date had been set for thefulfilment ofEmperor Joseph’s promise and that in any case it had been addressed specifically (and therefore, so it could be argued, exclusively) to the Jews of Bohemia. It was softened further by the peti­ tioners’ admission that the labour entailed by a serious reformist effort to revise legislation on the Jews throughout the empire might prove too great and complex a task to be undertaken as a single, comprehensive enterprise. And in the end, the petitioners reduced their request almost to a nullity by limiting it to their own very specific case, that of the Jews of Vienna alone, on the self-justificatory, but not unreasonable, grounds that results in Vienna would serve as a model for reform elsewhere. None of this made the desired impression, however. The imperial bureaucracy at its highest reaches refused to go beyond the operative conclusion that far too many contradictory considerations and interests ran through the matter of the Jews for it to be dealt with in a reforming spirit. The emperor himself did note that there was a lack of logic and some injustice too in the requirement that Jews serve in the imperial army on a basis of equality with everyone else while continuing to suffer a greater burden of taxes than others. But the counter-consideration, part fiscal, part polit­ ical, carried greater weight. The state, it was decided, could not afford to dispense with the revenue raised through the various special taxes laid upon the Jews. If the burden on the Jews was to be eased, an increased burden would have to be levelled—indiscriminately—on the population as a whole. That would imply that improvement in the condition of the Jews had to be at the cost of the non-Jewish subjects of the empire, which would make a very bad impression all round and was therefore out of the question. In contrast, the inverse proposition, namely that an improve­ ment in the condition of the non-Jewish subjects might be at the cost of the Jews, was always acceptable—except among the Jews themselves to be sure, but their views hardly mattered. On the linked issue of the method whereby taxes were collected, the Austrian bureaucracy, like the Russian, recognized that the effect of holding the Jewish communal organizations responsible for their collection was to strengthen their authority and reinforce the internal self-government and political 3 Raphael Mahler, Divrei yemei yisrael: dorot aharonim, vi (Tel Aviv, 1976), 180.

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cohesion of the Jewish communities. This was intrinsically undesirable, besides running counter to the larger political and social purposes of the state. Alas, it was admitted privately in Vienna, were those great socio­ political purposes ever achieved and, more concretely, if a majority of Jews were actually to abandon their religion for one of the three Chris­ tian faiths, ‘as we would all dearly wish them to’, the imperial treasury would find it more difficult than ever to cover its deficit. It was an awk­ ward dilemma out of which the Habsburg bureaucracy saw no escape. Raphael Mahler’s dictum, that ‘as a defenceless national and religious minority, [the Jews] served both as an object of special and unrestrained fiscal exploitation and as a scapegoat to mollify the bitterness of a Chris­ tian population burdened as it was with ordinary taxes’,4 could not have been more starkly confirmed. It is true, that proposals for the reform of the system ofJewish disabil­ ities were never lacking in Vienna. There was a suggestion that the Jews be permitted at long last to purchase land for cultivation. The rationale was the familiar one: they would then be free to perform those useful functions in society and in the economy that had long been demanded of them; the improvement in their economic standing would render them a better source of tax-derived state income than the one they now pro­ vided; closer contact with the general, Christian population would bring them closer to Christianity itself; and hard labour in the fields, salutary in itself, would have the added happy result of raising their death rate. Still, in Vormärz (i.e. pre-1848) Austria, this was too radical an idea to be adopted. When, after the Napoleonic wars, imperial policy on the Jews was finally reformulated and promulgated (22 January 1822) it was laid down that there was to be no increase either ofJewish numbers or of areas of permitted settlement and that existing laws and ordinances were all to continue to be complied with meticulously. The sole concession to those pressing for change was an instruction to prepare a province-by-province survey of all legislation applicable to Jews carrying the explanatory pro­ viso that the purpose of the operation was ‘to render the morality, way of life, and occupations of the Jews unharmful’ and to accommodate them, little by little, and so far as possible, to those spheres in civil society into which they will be permitted to enter. Some minor easing of the tax bur­ den did follow in Bohemia and Hungary when it was realized that the communities concerned were incapable of raising the funds demanded of them. An attempt to Germanize Jewish ritual and prayer services was made, but failed when it was borne in upon the authorities that the partly acculturated, still tiny community in Vienna was hopelessly unrepresen­ tative of the deeply orthodox mass ofJewry in the rest of the empire. And the ever less certain and coherent approach of the Habsburg bureaucracy 4 Raphael Mahler, Divrei yetnei yisrael: dorot aharonim, 181.

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prior to 1848 and for years thereafter is perhaps best illustrated by its response to pressure from Vienna’s Roman Catholic archdiocese in 1833 for a rule prohibiting Jewish midwives from tending to Christian women in confinement except in the presence of another Christian woman. The government caved in, but indecisively so, the demand ran too blatantly counter to the general thrust of its policy which, all in all, was one of reducing, if not totally eliminating, restrictions of this nature: the ordin­ ance was approved and promulgated, later it was withdrawn as impract­ icable, later still it was promulgated anew in modified form. The final requirement was that Jewish midwives were indeed to be watched over by Christian women; but it was laid down too that in the event of no qualified Christian observer being available to watch over her, the Jewish midwife was entitled nevertheless to proceed alone.5 There was a brief moment when, under the terms of the liberal constitution of 4 March 1849, civil and political rights ceased entirely to be dependent on reli­ gion. But that constitution was abrogated at the end of 1851. Not until the 1860s was the legal equality of all the Jews of Austria finally resolved upon and mean-mindedness of this order done away with. In the Germanies the reservations of the reformers were closer to the surface and somewhat more to the forefront of the official mind. In Bavaria, a Registration Law (1813) designed to keep the numbers of Jews down and subsidiary rules making their emancipation conditional on individual occupation, education, and property remained in force until 1848. The right of fùlly free movement within the kingdom was not granted until 1861. In Prussia, the reforming minister Karl vorn Stein, having gone some distance towards legislating emancipation, ended by changing his mind. The Jews were not true Germans, he decided. Their influence on society was pernicious and corruptive, notably in respect of the peasantry. The rights extended to them had been extended prema­ turely. They could be improved somewhat, he thought, some of them anyway. But best of all would be to have them removed from Germany altogether.6 Stein was not alone among Prussian statesmen of the first order in his feelings on the subject. Wilhelm von Humboldt, more lib­ eral, more inclined to a universalistic outlook, a man who had favoured the immediate grant of political rights to Jews, wished none the less to do so on the basis of a clear restriction of their numbers,7 especially of citizen Jews as opposed to resident alien Jews. This was the spirit in which the Prussian Edict of Toleration of 1812 was applied in practice, restricting it solely to the old Prussia, namely that which had been contained within the borders as they stood in 1812 in contrast to the enlarged post-1815 5 Ibid. 185. 6 Alfred D. Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans (Philadelphia, 1979), 120-3. 7 P. L. Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism (Princeton, 1990), 79 ff.

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Prussian state. In re-annexed Posen, where a full 40 per cent of all the Jewish subjects of the new, enlarged Prussian state resided and Jews formed 6.5 per cent of the total population, it was firm policy to keep them confined within the province and so far as possible deprived of formal citizenship. As late as 1846, 80 per cent of Posen Jews were still without citizenship. Within Prussia in its entirety, the specific article of the original Edict of Toleration that provided for Jews’ eligibility (under certain conditions) to state office had been suspended indefinitely. In 1818 Jews were excluded from academic positions. In 1819 Jewish officials in the Rhineland (appointed under the French) were sacked. And as an odd, but seemingly logical, consequence of the Edict of 1812 the sphere of gov­ ernmental regulation of matters Jewish was extended. If the Jews—cer­ tain categories ofJews, at all events—were to be members of the body politic, Prussian officialdom was obliged to pay not less, but more atten­ tion to them. A range of topics to which no more than summary atten­ tion, or none at all, had been paid in the past were now being looked into: the education of Jewish children, the dress of the rabbis, the precise degree to which Jews were entering the professions, especially that of the law, or, in contrast and rather more in the old spirit, their continued pres­ ence or otherwise in certain sectors of the criminal classes (illicit ped­ dling, smuggling, horse thievery, for example). But it was all more complicated than in the past. While there had been nothing like the clean regulatory and administrative sweep as, when all is said and done, had been the case in France, it was evident that the Jews themselves were changing. It had now to be accepted that they were of more than one kind. Those who were still in the traditional mould continued to evoke the old stereotypical responses in the official mind and in official conduct. But what of the others, the new men and women? Under the terms of the Judenordnung of 1750, still in force despite its harking back quite openly to medieval rules and practices, Jews were disqualified from bearing witness in criminal cases, cases of homicide especially. In circumstances where Jewish testimony was absolutely indis­ pensable it had been customary for the oath to be taken in an ancient and peculiarly grotesque and humiliating form: a variation on the notorious ‘Jewish oath’ (morejudaico).* This was deeply resented by Jews as an affront 8 The origins of the Jewish oath have been traced to the Dark Ages. It took a variety of forms, some exceedingly and deliberately demeaning, many bizarre. All were founded on the notion that unless a Jew was in some way tied down by a multitude ofself-imposed, religiously ordained, specifically Jewish sanctions that he himself believed would operate against him in the event of his uttering a falsehood his evidence was worthless. Where his testimony was indispensable, however, so that some use might be made of it after all, the witness would be compelled to swear his oath in some unique, generally grotesque form: wearing special dress or headgear for the occasion, having it administered to him by a rabbi

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and an obvious denial of equality before the law. And it had become too anomalous in a self-respecting Rechtsstaat for some judges to swallow. It was pointed out on one occasion that as the law stood Jews could be openly murdered in their synagogues and the murderers remain unpunished on the grounds that Jewish testimony, all that would be available, was unreliable a priori. Courts in Posen went so far as to refuse to deal with criminal cases until the disability had been removed.9 And the same tidymindedness worked in the Jews’ favour in other spheres of government too to some extent. Where Jews were manifestly reform minded, acculturated, comparatively comfortable in their circumstances, and able—by the Prussian ruling class’s own standards—to pass muster, there, increas­ ingly, it was almost impossible for officials not to find themselves regard­ ing them with something akin to favour. Here after all was evidence that acculturation and ‘de-nationalization’ had had precisely the effect that had been hoped for. The rise amongst the Jews of manifestly ‘respectable businessmen’ of ‘unblemished record and behaviour’ was even likely, so some believed, to put an end not only to much of what had always been objectively undesirable about them, but also to that socially disturbing envy and disregard which the wealth of the Jews and their economic hyperactivity (Betriebsamkeit)'0 tended to provoke in others. In the early years of Frederick William IV’s reign (1840-61) there was a reversal: a plan to restructure Prussian Jewry from top to bottom all over again, remaking it as a legal socio-economic corporation on what was con­ ceived to be more like the original medieval model, was put forward. By 1847 matters had gone so far that a new, distinctive constitution for Jews was passed into law. Whether so anachronistic a plan could ever have been made to work is questionable. And in the event, the proclamation of reli­ gious freedom issued in the revolutionary year of 1848 rendered it inop­ erative anyway. On the whole, it was uncertainty and fluidity of attitude that defined the period. In the long term, therefore, it was a matter of choice and judgement whether one placed one’s emphasis on the evident progress towards full emancipation or on the equally evident limits set upon it. Discrimination against Jews in the state bureaucracy, the academy, the judiciary, and the armed forces was very carefully maintained, firmest of all in the army where discrimination amounted to total prohibition. It was impossible for a Jew to be commissioned in a Prussian regiment even as an officer in rather than an officer of the court, probably in a synagogue rather than the courtroom, holding or confronting a scroll of the Law rather than a printed Bible, and very likely hold­ ing a lighted candle in his hand. On the issue of the oath more judaïco in contemporary France, see below, pp. 231 f. 9 Herbert Strauss, ‘Pre-Emancipation Prussian Policies towards the Jews 1815-1847’, LBIYBU (1966), 123-4. 10 Ibid. 118-20.

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the reserves. For a baptized Jew it was virtually impossible to be admitted (as an officer) into a ‘good’ regiment. But there were respects in which military rules, practices, and the rationale of overall policy were as untidy and contradictory as the civilian. The oath of loyalty and obedience was administered to Jewish army recruits in a simple and dignified form and phrased so as to cause them neither offence nor humiliation. On the other hand, over and above the particular issue of commissioned rank, the actual incorporation ofJews into the ranks of the Prussian army continu­ ally raised questions which neither the military authorities nor the sove­ reign himself either in the original Prussian state or in the post-1870 Reich that followed it could ever bring themselves to deal with in the forthright manner they sometimes privately thought its due. Should Jews be enlisted at all? No one seriously denied that in practice they had proved to be apt for service. And their time in the army was thought, not unreasonably, to move them still further along towards their ‘de­ nationalization’. Besides, to go so far as to exclude them entirely would be implicitly, but unmistakably, to express ‘unwarranted lack of confidence in the Jewish population’. And that was surely undesirable. But were Jewish soldiers, once enlisted, to be allowed the rights and privileges accorded all other servicemen and ex-servicemen? Were they to be allowed to rise in the ranks to a degree consistent with their abilities and qualifications, for example? Were they to be allowed to take up appropri­ ate posts in the state bureaucracy upon release? None of these questions was ever answered unequivocally. All caused sufficient discomfort in the higher circles of government for the king himself11 at one point to con­ sider ending military service for the Jews altogether rather than perpetu­ ate what he himself recognized as the injustice being done them.12 It was characteristic of the ambiguity in which the matter of the Jews as a whole was enveloped, long after their civil emancipation had been agreed upon, that while Jews continued to be subject to conscription, their inequality of status went uncorrected until the upheaval of the Great (or First World) War and the unprecedentedly dire needs it generated led to a gen­ eral, if still reluctant, limited, and temporary loosening of the old restric­ tions. In contrast, it is worth noting, in the Austro-Hungarian Joint Army’3 and, of course, in France matters were entirely otherwise. A

" Frederick William IV. 12 Strauss, ‘Pre-Emancipation Prussian Policies’, 125-6. 13 Jews were admitted to the Austro-Hungarian officer corps mostly as reservists, but some as career officers—not, with rare exceptions, to serve in the best (e.g. cavalry) regi­ ments, but at any rate on a basis that allowed a small number to rise to field and even gen­ eral rank. In 1911 3 per cent of the Joint Army’s rank and file, 17 per cent (!) of all reserve officers, and 0.6 per cent of all career officers were Jews. The Jewish share of the total population at this time was 4.4 per cent (Istvan Deâk, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 (New York, 1990), 171).

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French traveller to Germany cl860 noted with very considerable sur­ prise that Jews were regarded as unsuited to military service there and that it was said of them that they had ‘great repugnance’ for it. In France, he remarked, out of4,000 pupils admitted in the previous thirty years to the finest military academy of them all, the École Polytechnique, over a hun­ dred were Jews. ‘Thus while the Israelite population forms barely a four­ hundredth part of our population, its members figure in the military schools in the proportion of a fortieth’ (or ten times what might have been thought the proportion due).1415 By and large, therefore, under the terms of the rather more severe Prussian version of what might be termed the Metternichian balance, the freedoms that had been accorded the Jews as individuals were retained; and the administrative establishment, whatever its members may have thought privately of the Jews and their emancipation, stuck to its eman­ cipatory guns. There was, that is to say, no retreat. For the modernists among the Jews and for the strong-minded liberals in the general popu­ lation this was still unsatisfactory, of course. But the process of liberaliza­ tion had moved slowly forward and the Jews themselves had learned to rely on the workings of the Rechtsstaat into which, with whatever reser­ vations, they had been admitted. The state, as they could perceive, while in many ways unfriendly, was generally correct in its treatment of them. The abortive effort to reconstitute Prussian Jewry as a separate and sep­ arable corporation in 1847 could be dismissed as an aberration—in the precipitation ofwhich the king’s personal idiosyncratic and anachronistic role counted for more than that of the bureaucrats who served him. In any event, no more was heard authoritatively from within the official establishment ofputting the process of emancipation and integration into reverse. Discordant notes were sounded from time to time, however. In 1826 the governor (Oberpräsident) of the Prussian-ruled province of Westphalia proposed to the minister of the interior in 1826 that all Jews in the kingdom of Prussia be given the choice of either accepting baptism within ten years or being unconditionally expelled. In 1847, in the United Prussian Diet, the Prussian Minister Ludwig von Thile declared that it was inconsistent with Christianity to grant political rights to Jews: their fatherland was Zion, not Prussia. In Baden, State CouncillorJohann Ludwig Kübler declared that Jews were ‘a fully closed, hereditarily con­ spiratorial society for specific political principles and commandments ... which excludes any gradual progress towards higher culture’.'5 In the course of the rare occasion of an open debate in the Prussian Landtag on 14 Dr Gallavardin, Voyage médical en Allemagne (Paris, I860), 125. Cited by Léon Poli­ akov, The History ofAnti-Semitism, iii. From Voltaire to Wagner (New York, 1975), 539 n. 3. 15 Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State (Oxford, 1992), 17-18; and Helmut Berding, Moderner Antisemitismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt-on-Main, 1988), 63, cited ibid.

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the matter of the Jews and their emancipation held on 15 June 1847, Bis­ marck took the line that Prussia was indeed a Christian state and that Jews could not expect equality within it, only a subordinate position. That might not be perfectly Christian, he said. But admitting the Jews into Prussia would not make Prussia itself more Christian. What the Jews most wanted, Bismarck continued, was to become military and civilian officers of the state. That had to be out of the question. He would only favour their complete emancipation if they, for their part, brought down the barriers by which they separated themselves from the Germans. Ten days later, when a motion to award the Jews full emancipation was put before the house, Bismarck’s concluding position was that it was unclear whether full emancipation was desirable and whether it amounted to progress}6 It was under Bismarck, nevertheless, twenty-two years later, in 1869, that (virtually) full emancipation was decreed. His famously unsentimen­ tal approach to politics had been to the forefront for some time. In 1853 he had opposed an attempt by the citizens of Frankfurt to deprive the Jews of recently achieved civic rights—although this was at least in part because he judged the Frankfurters pro-Austrian.16 17 When on 3 July 1869 he led the Bundestag of the North German Confederation (only the Mecklenburgers opposing) to pass a law stating that ‘All existing limita­ tions of the . . . civic rights which are rooted in differences of religious faith are hereby annulled. In particular, the capacity for participation in representation on the community and state level and in serving in public office shall be independent from religious faith.’ On this occasion Bis­ marck’s intention, ostensibly, was to settle the matter of the Jews’ civil rights once and for all. They were to be accorded Staatsbürgertum, not mere Bürgertum: effectively full political, rather than mere civic, rights. Once again, however, while the principle of full equality was conceded in principle it was only grudgingly and incompletely accorded in prac­ tice: the unwritten, but almost total, ban on the inclusion of Jews into the official civil and military hierarchies (with the partial exception of the lower judiciary) was retained. This owed much to the continuing ambivalence of sentiment on the subject in the governing classes of con­ temporary Germany. It probably owed a good deal too to Bismarck’s robust, unworried, and generally realistic approach to the Jews and their affairs: his refusal to take them quite as seriously as many of the people around him were accustomed to do and—so rare in the present con­ text—the light touch he was capable of bringing to this, as to other pub­ lic issues. In the 1847 Landtag debate he had expressed his flat opposition 16 Low, Jaw in the Eyes of the Germans, 295-6, citing Preussische Versammlung, 32nd sitting, 14 and 15 June 1847; ibid. 25 June 1847. 17 Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans, 313.

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to the legalization of mixed marriages between Jews and Christians. Years later he was reported to have spoken of them approvingly, at any rate in private. It was true, he affirmed, that there was a sense in which Jews had ‘no real home, that they are generally European, cosmopolitan, nomads. . . . [But] there are good honest people among them* who had the virtues of respect for parents, marital fidelity, and charitableness. They were, he said on another occasion, diligent, frugal, sober, enter­ prising, abstemious.18 What really needed to be done was to render them ‘innocuous through marriage’. The results of such marriages were known to be good, involving as they did ‘quite intelligent, nice people’. The fairly numerous marriages transacted between German baronesses and wealthy and talented Jews would serve as examples. But better still, Bismarck thought, were marriages between ‘Christian stallion[s] of Ger­ man upbringing with Jewish mare[s]. Money must [be made to recircu­ late]; there is no such thing as an evil race.’19 In Great Britain the governing classes were, on the whole, disinclined to take either so dark or so cynical a view of the Jews. The nature of the state, the normal methods and purposes of government and official decision-making, and the still very small dimensions of the Jewish com­ munity in Great Britain all combined to spare the political establish­ ment—and the Jews themselves—from systematic consideration of anything that might reasonably be identified as a Jewish Question. With the salient exception of membership in the Houses of Parliament polit­ ical rights had long been conceded them. When this too was demanded in the form of the repeated election of a Jew to the House of Com­ mons—making it a demand that could not be dismissed on the grounds that it came from Jews alone—there was, eventually, no choice but to deal with it. The result was a full dress, public debate on the matter of the Jews closely interconnected with issues of general social and political principle of a kind and quality that had occurred nowhere else in Europe since the celebrated debate in the French National Assembly in 1789. Its eccen­ tricity alone would suffice to render it worthy of attention. The issue had arisen earlier on several occasions, but it was not until 1847, in the wake of the general election that had led to the formation of a new, Liberal government under Lord John Russell and the election of Lionel de Rothschild as one of the four members for the City of London (one of whom, as it happened, was Lord John Russell himself) that the matter finally came to a head. The formal propriety of Rothschild’s elec­ tion was not in question. The sticking-point, as before, was the oath required of all Members of Parliament before taking their seats. Changes 18 Speaking to Moritz Busch, a prominent anti-Semite himself, in 1870 and again in 1892. Cited by Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans, 361. 19 Ibid.

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in the wording had already been made to accommodate those who were not members of the established Church, but the phrase ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ remained. Decades earlier, as would soon be pointed out, Edward Gibbon, a deist rather than a Christian, had sworn the oath and taken his seat. Nor had the oath presented a problem for Unitarians whose denial of the validity of the central tenet of the Christian religion, the Trinity, was in its way as firm as that of the Jews. On the other hand, no one seriously questioned the proposition that a Jew could not, and should not be expected to, take such an oath. The formal proposal to change the rules put to the House of Commons by the new Prime Min­ ister, Russell, on 16 December 1847 was cast in sweeping terms: ‘It is expedient to remove all civil disabilities at present existing, affecting Her Majesty’s subjects of the Jewish religion, with the like exceptions as are provided for Her Majesty’s subjects professing the Roman Catholic reli­ gion.’ A long, intense, often learned, and on the whole unacrimonious debate followed on 16 and 17 December 1847, the nub of which was whether England was and should remain, and if so in what precise sense, a Christian country.20 Some Members did think the question an irrele­ vance, alternatively of negligible importance: the principle of the admis­ sion ofJews to society and to quite important offices of state had long since been conceded. But others thought that, on the contrary, the mat­ ter of admission to Parliament was unique and that the Bar of the House of Commons was one that no non-Christian—Jew or Hindu, Muslim or pagan, for that matter—should be allowed to cross if the religious, moral, and historic foundations of the state were not to be irreversibly compro­ mised. For some the overriding question for Parliament to consider and to affirm was whether Christianity was or was not the true religion. If the answer was in the affirmative (as all were presumed to agree that it was), was it not unreasonable to assert, merely because some who were ‘infidels in their lives and writings’ had none the less found seats in this House, ‘that the national profession of Christianity on the part of the supreme Legislature of the country ought to be withdrawn?’21 In this sense, though never fully explicitly, the basic division of opinion revealed by the debate was between those whose conception of the state was traditional­ ist and conservative (therefore, in party terms, Tory) and those whose view was liberal, if in fact not fully secular, progressive, and open-minded (and therefore Liberal). All in all, the great strength and authenticity of the religious convictions of the great majority of the participants in the debate in the House of Commons were unmistakable—wherein the 20 Hansard, 3rd series, Iccccv, cols. 1233-1401. 21 Sir R. H. Inglis, Member for Oxford University, the leading opponent of the measure, ibid., col. 1259. W. E. Gladstone, the other member for Oxford University, although a member of the opposition, took the opposite line, supporting Russell.

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salient differences between it and the revolutionary National Assembly in France in 1789 and 1791.22 There the debates had by no means been devoid of reference to Christian values and the articulation of longestablished Christian views and judgements upon Judaism and Jewry. But the central concerns had been socio-economic and political and, in a broad sense, philosophical. It is true that in London, as in Paris in 1789, and fairly regularly elsewhere from that time on, the question of the national character ofJewry along with that of the Jews’ continued belief in messianic redemption and eventual migration to Palestine and a nation-state of their own were raised in the course of the debate. But they were not raised with special force. Nor was much time and energy devoted to them. Gladstones very carefully phrased denial of ‘the supposition that the Jews are a separate nation in such a sense as to be dis­ qualified from the performance of civil duties’ prevailed.23 This single, never to be repeated, full-scale public debate on the matter of Jewish emancipation in London differed from its analogues on the continent in the further respect that it was almost entirely devoid of anti-Jewish animus. Not all went so far as to assert with Lord Ashley, the future Lord Shaftesbury, as he agonized over his inability to support the motion, that The Jews were a people of very powerful intellect, of cultivated minds, and with habits of study that would defy the competition of the most indefatigable Ger­ man. Their literature extended in an unbroken chain from the days of our Lord down to the present time.... [And] he (Lord Ashley) was speaking not of the old Jews in their palmy days, but of the Jews oppressed and despised in their days of dispersion. Even thus, their literature embraced every subject of science and learning, of secular and religious knowledge.... They took the lead in grammar and lexicography.... [T]heir labours ... formed the basis of everything that had been done since by Christian doctors . ..

But none directly contested him. [T]he Jews [Ashley went on to say] presented ... in our day, in proportion to their numbers, a far larger list of men of genius and learning than could be exhib­ ited by any Gentile country. Music, poetry, medicine, astronomy, occupied their attention, and in all they were more than a match for their competitors. .. . They had discarded very many of their extravagant and anti-social doctrines. Their hatreds and their suspicions were subdued, and undoubtedly they exhib­ ited a greater desire and a greater fitness [sic] to re-enter the general family of mankind.

So while Ashley could not bring himself to agree to anything that implied a separation of politics from religion and was, for that reason, unwilling to have words that ‘asserted the truth and maintained the 22 See above, Chapter 1. 23 Hansard, 3rd series, Iccccv, col. 1285.

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supremacy of the Gospel’ struck from the parliamentary oath, he was firmly of the view that the Jews merited ‘every [other] concession that could contribute to their honour and comfort’.24 To the view that the Jews merited a ‘concession’ that could contribute to their ‘honour and comfort’ there was, in fact, no opposition at all. Gladstone, once again, helped to set the tone of the debate by being prominent among those who restated and reaffirmed Ashley’s high opin­ ion of the Jews. Speaking of their ‘indefatigable diligence, which out­ strips even German assiduity’ he, for his part, drew the conclusion that to exclude them from privileges that they had good reason to claim was to instil a justifiable grievance: justifiable and needless—as if the presence of a few Jews in the House of Commons could have any effect on the way in which it conducted its business or impinge, for that matter, on its essentially Christian character.25 Disraeli, with his flair for paradox and provocation, sided with those who, unlike Lord John Russell, Gladstone, and his own political partner Lord George Bentinck, but like Ashley, thought everything must turn ultimately on the principle that Britain was a Christian state. But he turned that argument on its head. There was, he agreed, a matter of principle at stake. But he disagreed with those who asserted that it was the principle of religious liberty. On the contrary, just as the opponents of the measure had argued, it was a matter of religious truth, except that he, for his part, drew the opposite conclusion. It was precisely because Britain was a Christian state and Christianity was the true religion that the government’s measure should be supported. The Jews, Disraeli told the House, humanly speaking, were the authors of your religion. They are unquestionably those to whom you are indebted for no inconsiderable portion of your known religion, and for the whole of your divine knowledge.

As for the matter of conduct, Well, then I say that if religion is a security for righteous conduct, you have that security in the instance of the Jews who profess a true religion. It may not be in your more comprehensive form. I do not say it is the true religion; but although they do not profess all that we profess, all that they do profess is true.26

Disraeli’s contribution to the debate was not taken very seriously. Nor, one suspects, did he himself expect it to be. It can serve, of course, as yet another (if minor) illustration of the fact that matters of religious prin­ ciple continued to count for a good deal in Victorian England. Nothing remotely like the open repudiation of Christianity and organized religion generally that, as everyone knew, was possible in France and, in certain circumstances and circles both popular and politically useful there, was 24 Hansard, 3rd series, Iccccv, cols. 1281—2. 25 Ibid., cols. 1284-90. » Ibid., cols. 1323-5.

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acceptable as yet in Great Britain, certainly not in open debate in Parlia­ ment. There were indeed references in the course of the debate to ways in which the French had dealt with the issue—more especially to what were supposed to have been the larger consequences of the full emanci­ pation of the Jews in France. An opponent of the measure argued that the Roman Catholic Church’s ‘deserting the Government that had cast it off’ and its adoption of‘the Ultramontane system of entire dependence upon the See of Rome’ should serve as a warning against any move in England towards the separation of Church and State.27 A supporter of the measure replied that in fact the results had been all to the good: ‘There is more vital religion at present in France, both in the Protestant and Catholic sections, than has been known before.’ He added, for good measure, that ‘the Church of France ... enjoys increasing power over the people’.28 On the whole, therefore, it was a mild and civilized debate: supporting evidence, it could be argued, for Lord George Bentinck’s contention that ‘there is no longer that deep feeling even of prejudice in the country against the Jews, which ought to prevent us from listening to their just demands, backed by the voice of the city of London’.29 To which further supporting evidence was supplied by the results: a firm majority in favour of the measure (253 ayes; 186 noes) that was well in excess of the govern­ ment’s nominal strength, many of the Peelites and two of the fiercest of all the opponents of the government, Bentinck and Disraeli, having sup­ ported Russell on this special occasion. And there is no good reason to suppose that the outcome was not a fair reflection of opinion in the more sophisticated reaches of English society. Opinion elsewhere, however, was less easygoing. Bentinck paid for his independence of mind by being driven from the leadership of his own parliamentary faction: mostly Tories of the old school, a class of people, country gentlemen prominent among them, whose view of the matter of the Jews was at once more abstract and less friendly than that of the worldly Whigs and the practical and in many cases intellectually inclined Peelites.30 And the consequence was that in real terms nothing changed for the time being. The unre­ formed House of Lords, its Bench of Bishops playing a prominent role in its debates, rejected the Bill and continued systematically to reject all subsequent Bills passed to it by the Commons that were designed to make it possible for a Jew (more specifically, for Lionel Rothschild) to take a seat in Parliament once elected to it. Only in 1858 did Rothschild finally gain admittance on the basis ofan agreement that each House would be free 27 C. G. Newdegate, ibid., col. 1370. 28 Viscount Morpeth, ibid., col. 1373. 29 Ibid., col. 1385. 30 Oddly, when Bentinck died a year later, it was Benjamin Disraeli, whose position had been identical with that of Bentinck’s, and who was of course a Jew himself (although a baptized member of the Church of England), who was chosen to replace him.

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to determine for itself the wording of the oath it required its members to take. Not until 1866, in response, as it happened, to Catholic pressure, was a wholly new oath drawn up, one that contained neither the pledge to abjure the intention to subvert the established Church of England (which the Catholics found offensive) nor the words ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ which the Jews could under no circumstances affirm. And not until the Promissory Oaths Act of 1871 were the last impediments to Jews holding public office swept wholly away.31 In general, however, it was not the more dramatic and easily isolated stages—the set-piece battles, as it were—in the process by which the for­ mal, legal liberation of the Jews unfolded in western and central Europe that attracted consistent comment and, over time, precipitated the sharpest reactions in the wider public. It was the continuing spectacle of Jews intermingling relatively freely with others socially, penetrating places of business and academic study and the world of letters, proposing themselves and being proposed by others as candidates for office and social position of all kinds, and beginning to expect and even positively and independently claiming equality of status and opportunity with men and women of the established governing classes that excited com­ ment and left a wake of comment, displeasure, and opposition. For these were all phenomena that ran counter to previous experience, a fortiori to notions of conventional propriety. More disturbing still for those who viewed the scene with disquiet, in some cases with distress, the mount­ ing, demonstrable ability of Jews to meet acceptable standards of lan­ guage, dress, deportment, and culture increasingly deprived those who would deny them access to the inner arenas of society and the economy of the arguments that had long been the established grounds for doing so. But it would be men of ideas, not men of power, still less the merely angered but mostly passive observers of the scene, who would give voice to this still commonly unfocused irritation. Broadly these were of two kinds. The milder formulations of the general notion that the presence of the Jews in European society struck not merely at their actual or potential commercial and professional rivals and, in somewhat new and subtle ways at Christendom, but at the very fundaments of European society tended to emerge from among those who, on the whole, wished to maintain the established social and political order. The stronger formulations were the work of those who wished to demolish it. It was the latter too who would do most to cause their case against the Jews to percolate into the public arena to greatest effect. Their weakness, to be sure, lay in the fact that in the nature of things they operated on the margin of the relevant circles of power and social control or, more likely still, entirely beyond them. Their strength— and the latent danger of their ideas for the Jews themselves—lay in what 31 With, it seems, the single exception of the office of Lord Chancellor.

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they were really about: a grand attempt at one and the same time to explain the contemporary political universe and to vindicate the effort to destroy it.

II Looking back upon the course of the emancipatory process this was a very remarkable development. To those of the preceding generation who had sought to promote, or at any rate allow the emancipation of the Jews and their integration on terms of one kind or another into general society the placing of the matter of the Jews in any of its aspects anywhere except on the distant rim of public consciousness—or beyond it altogether—could not have failed to be seen as odd, if not perverse. Those who had taken up the issue of emancipation at the end of the eighteenth century had approached it, as we have seen, with fairly clear, but very general prin­ ciples in mind. These had to do with efficacious government, natural just­ ice, a certain view of human nature and the human condition as a whole, a strong belief in what in our own times would be called social engineer­ ing, and an equally firm conviction that social singularities and eccentri­ cities that stood in the way of society’s refoundation on a rational and coherent basis should and could be done away with. But except to a cer­ tain degree in Russia and Poland none regarded the matter of the Jews as one of central and abiding social concern. Nor was there much interest in Jewry as a society or civilization. The view taken of them was patronizing rather than sympathetic. And it tended to be dismissive of their culture and ethos in very much the style of those major central European intel­ lectual figures, Goethe among them, who were hostile to the entire exer­ cise and saw the Jews much as did the rest of the society of which they were members, namely in accepted stereotypical terms: a race of vulgar and by and large unscrupulous traders and moneylenders. It cannot be said that there was much fire in Goethe’s belly about the issue. The Jews of antiquity impressed him; those who were his contemporaries did not. But he thought that while the Jews could be suppressed they could not so easily be annihilated—in which regard they were much like the Germans themselves—and that once certain concessions had been made to them it would be hard to rescind them. What Goethe opposed very strongly was the legalization of mixed marriages on the old-fashioned, rational grounds—grounds that any orthodox Jew would have understood and approved of—that it made a nonsense of established religion. To marry ‘a Jewess in the name of the Holy Trinity [demonstrated] contempt for reli­ gious feeling,’ he said; adding, ‘But I do not hate Jews.’32 32 Mark Waldmann, Goethe and the Jews: A Challenge to Hitlerism (New York, 1934), 246 ff. and passim; and Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans, 67-86.

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Kant, for his part, thought very little of ancient and traditional Jewry, so far as he ventured to study it, which was not in fact very far. His view of the ‘Palestinians who live among us’ was harsher still. They were inclined to usury and fraud and other unproductive and nefarious activ­ ities, ‘a nation of cheaters of which by far the greatest part does not seek any civil honours, which is held together by an old superstition recog­ nized by the state in which they live, and which seeks the advantages of tricking the people among whom they find protection and cheating each other’.33 But Kant does not seem to have thought that there was anything that was irremediably wrong about the Jews. And given his insistence on equality for all and on differences of origin and religion being irrelevant to the duties of one man to another, he saw no reason to oppose their being granted civil rights and equality before the law. He thought that the adoption of Christianity would help clear the way to it. So would educa­ tion. So too would a general cleaning-up of Jewish ritual—an idea he may have borrowed from ‘progressive’ or reformist Jews whom he had come to know. Hegel took no more interest in the matter of contempor­ ary Jewry than Kant and where he touched upon it his thoughts were primarily on their improvement, their moral improvement above all. Freedom and morality were always intertwined and interdependent, cer­ tainly so in the case of the Jews. They had therefore to be rendered worthy of life within the superior European society into which they had come to be embedded. To provide for the Jews’ emancipation would be to set them on the road to eventual moral and social improvement. But emancipation had to be conditional in turn upon their moral and social improvement. The tone is patronizing rather than critical.34 These quite mild views on the subject of contemporary Jewry accorded fairly well with what the central European governments were actually about. And in a general way they accorded too with the views expressed by the very much smaller figure of Christian Wilhelm Dohm35 who knew (or who certainly presumed to know) rather more about the Jews than Goethe or Hegel or Kant and counted for a good deal more in the present context. Yes, wrote Dohm, the Jews were corrupt, in fact rather more corrupt than other nations. Yes, they were aliens: their ori­ gins were in Asia. No, there could be no question of conferring full Prussian citizenship upon them or of admitting them to public office, not for a very long while, at any rate. Nor would it be in their own deeper interest for them to be allowed to do so. The hugely regrettable 33 Probably from Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht abgefasst (Königsberg, 1798). Cited by Low, Jews in the Eyes of the Germans, 94. 34 G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, 4th edn. (Hamburg, 1955), 225—6 n. Cf. Shelomo Avineri, ‘Le-birur ‘emdato shel Hegel li-she’elat ha-emanzipazia’, Zion, 25, 2 (1960), 134-6. 35 See Chapterl.

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commercial spirit with which most Jews were infused was more likely to be broken by heavy physical labour than by sedentary work as public ser­ vants. But, alas, the idea of settling them on the land was a doubtful one. There was little uncultivated land left in Europe to allot to them. The Jews were unused to ‘the interminable industry [unausgesetzten Fleiß] and hard work that farming demands. Their minds are too restless [unruhig] and they lack the necessary physical strength.... [And] how will the Jew feed his farmhands if he is not allowed to give them pork?’36 Still, the nub of the matter, so far as Dohm was concerned, lay elsewhere. While the Jews were corrupt, they were not wholly corrupt. If their nation’s exag­ gerated love of every kind of profit, usury, and crooked practice com­ peted incessantly with the finer traits of Jewish character, why these were faults that had been nourished on the one hand by the Jews’ religious principles and the sophistries of their rabbis and, on the other hand, by Christian oppression. Like so many other protagonists of ‘amelioration’ or even eventual emancipation Dohm had scarcely a good word to say about the Jews themselves as he knew (or thought he knew) them. The difference between him and those who, in the final analysis, would do most to formulate the Jewish Question as it came to be most widely accepted and understood in the course of the nineteenth century lay not in either party’s assessment of the Jews as they were, but in their belief or disbelief in the Jews susceptibility to change and improvement.

Ill A world away from the compliments paid the Jews in the House of Com­ mons in 1847 was the popular image of‘the Jew*: old clothes’ man, tailor, petty usurer, occasional thief, hook-nosed, pot-bellied, lisping, obsequious, unclean, alien, absurd. Punch, faithful reflecting mirror of English middle-class views, was generally favourable to the effort to gain admittance to Parliament for the Jews. But it chose to report on it from time to time in terms such as these: My name is mo samuel, a poor little Jew; Tro de Shety I trampsh it, de Commonsh in view; But though I am shent dere, ’tis bootlesh to go, For de Lordsh sets deir face agin poor little Mo’! My constituensh often have chose me in vain, And shent me to Parliament over again,

36 C.W. Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Vebesserung derJuden, Part Two (Berlin and Stettin, 1783), 246-7.

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Determined the shpirit of Britonsh to show; But de Lordsh sets deir face agin poor little Mo’!37

But more important, because more powerfully and emotively put, and more revealing of deeper strains of anti-Jewish opinion in English society, were the dissident voices on the ultra-radical left. The Chartists favoured Jewish emancipation as a matter of principle and they did not hesitate to condemn oppression of the Jews by the government of Russia. But in general they lumped Jews with other parasitical and oppressive enemies of the working class. ‘We do not live in a Christian country,’ wrote ‘Anonymous’ in the Poor Man's Guardian, ‘we live in a country ofJews, and usurers, and parsons, and plunderers, and hangmen, and lawyers, and shopcrats, and vampires, and soldiers, and “statesmen”, and blood­ hounds.’38 For William Cobbett (1763—1835), on the other hand, succes­ sively copying clerk, soldier, traveller, journalist, farmer, convict (for attacking the brutal forms of punishment employed in the British army), fugitive for fear of imprisonment for seditious libel, author of a famous account ofjourneys through contemporary England, and finally Member of Parliament himself, the matter of the entry ofJews into English life was a capital one. He fought the first substantial steps to dissolve Jewish disabilities in the harshest terms he could muster. Jew' he wrote, ‘has always been synonymous with sharper, cheat, rogue. This has been the case with no other race of mankind. Rothschild married his own niece. They will flock in upon us from all countries.’39 It is worth recalling that Cob­ bett was a man ofvery modest origins born in a land still ruled for all prac­ tical purposes by an immensely affluent landed aristocracy. To the end of his life he was an outsider and an eccentric. Hugely radical and xenophobic in his views, he was also a reactionary in the strict sense of favouring a return to a pre-industrial agrarian economy and its supposed, associated virtues. He was famously cantankerous and abusive. But he was a man whose finger was on the pulse of his country as Britain moved to the summit of its time as the most modern, liberal, technically accomplished and wealthy of major European states. Cobbett denounced the Jews as murderers of Christ and blasphemers of his Gospel. The ‘murder ofJesus Christ by the Jews, had been a savage murder, committed after long premeditation, effected by hypocrisy and bribery and peijury; accompanied with scorn and mockery of the innocent suf­ ferer; and proceeding from motives of the basest and blackest that ever disgraced 37 Punch, 1853. Cited in Anne and Roger Cowen, Victorian Jews through British Eyes (Oxford, 1986), 26. 3S 16 Mar. 1833. Cited in E. Silberner, ‘British Socialism and the Jews’, Historia Judaica, 14 (1952), 33. 39 Lewis Melville, The Ufe and Letters of William Cobbett in England and America, 2 vols. (London, 1913), 21. Emphases in original.

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the hearts of even that reprobate people whom God, by the mouth of the prophets, has appropriately denominated [filth and dross and scum' and who he has doomed, as in the words of my text, to be 'dispersed in the countries’, and to have no inheritance except in their own bodies, on which also he has set his mark of reprobation making them ‘a mocking to all countries’.441

But he denounced them too as parasites who in their persons epitom­ ized the new world of urban living and finance capital in which, unlike in earlier golden, more generous times, Mammon and materialism were supreme; and this was of a piece with the rest of his thinking and writing. Cobbett’s vision of his country was of‘England’ rather than of England: Constable’s England, one might say, rather than Turners. It was, in any event, an England to which the Jews, he had no doubt, contributed noth­ ing. To the claim (made in the early debates in Parliament on the removal of Jewish disabilities and in the later ones as well) that the Jews were among the most industrious ofBritish subjects, Cobbett’s response was to challenge anyone to ‘produce a Jew who ever dug, who went to the plough, or who ever made his own coat or his own shoes, or who did anything at all, except get all the money he could from the pockets of the people’.41 In any event, they were ‘on the side of oppression, assisting tyranny... bitter foes of... popular rights and liberties,... it is amongst masses of debts and misery that they thrive as birds and beast get fat in times of pestilence ... instruments in the hands of tyrants for plundering their subjects.... [In sum] the enemies of all Christians’,42 not so much a principal enemy, then, more one intolerable manifestation among others of a general, evil phenomenon. In this Cobbett had something in com­ mon with writers of other kinds, other social classes, later generations, and, politically speaking, less radical opinions, Dickens among them, whose portrayal of the Jew Fagin as a monster of criminality remains unforgettable. The walls and ceiling of the room were perfectly bleak with age and dirt. There was a deal table before the fire: upon which were a candle, stuck in a ginger-beer bottle, two or three pewter pots, a loaf and butter, and a plate. In a hying pan, which was on the fire, and which was secured to the mantel-shelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare ... ‘This is him, Fagin,’ said Jack Dawkins: ‘my friend Oliver Twist.’ The Jew grinned; and making a low obeisance to Oliver, took him by the hand, and hoped he should have the honour of his intimate acquaintance.43

In Anthony Trollope’s novels, however, ‘the Jew’ moves on from being 40 41 42 43

Good Friday; or, the Murder ofJesus Christ by theJews (London, 1830), 4,17. Hansard, 3rd series, xvi, 22 Mar. 1833, cols. 973-5. Good Friday, 17. Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist was first published in 1838.

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merely alien and nasty and a symbol of a world gone wrong towards the more advanced position that he was not merely sign but cause as well. In his novel The Landleaguers, the Jewish music master, Mahomet Moss, is given what Trollope presumably thought was his (and his people’s) due: professionally punctilious and effective, even indispensable. At the same time, like all his kind, forever and incurably ‘greasy’.44 The ancient fear of falling into the Jews’ debt is much harped upon. And his alien character is driven home in close parallel with Trollope’s separate, rather grave discussion of the matter of individuals of any kind passing from one society to another (the boy Florian, of Protestant family, by conversion to Catholicism becomes in Irish eyes ‘one of us’ both conceptually and literally to his cost and everyone else’s). Here Trollope, as close an observer of the upper classes of Victorian society as was Dickens of the lower and middle classes, reflects the image of the Jews as it would appear and reappear and be repeatedly refined in the upper reaches of society and in the literature of his times and well into the twentieth century. There were exceptions to what was virtually the rule, George Eliot offering the crowning example. But it was the rule that counted: the Jew as alien, vul­ gar, anything but socially acceptable, and .. . greasy. Whereas the poorly imagined Mahomet (sic) Moss and his people are incidental to The Landleaguers, in Trollope’s much more serious and heartfelt discussion of middling to late Victorian society, written well before his Irish novel, but when he had already succumbed (prematurely) to the old man’s disease of bitterness and disappointment, matters are otherwise. In The Way We Live Now Jews are indeed offered up as primary, unmistakable symbols, but also as the makers of a very great deal of what is evil and intolerable in a world in which honour and decency have been lost, in which material gain and appetite are all, and in which society from top to bottom has been corrupted. All the clichés are there. The Jewish businessman, Mr Brehgert is described twice on alternate pages as ‘a fat, greasy man offifty, conspicuous for hair-dye*. The Christian girl who is about to marry this perfectly decent man wonders how she can ever tell her parents, ‘that she was engaged to marry a man who at the present moment went to the synagogue on a Saturday and carried out every other filthy abomination common to the despised people’. But it is as corrupters of a society that is already disposed to corruption—by Jews or by anyone or anything else—that they chiefly signify, their evil function being inseparable, to be sure, from their alien origins. It is Augustus Melmotte of uncertain provenance, who claims to be an Englishman, but clearly isn’t—the more 44 At any rate he s not a greasy Jew’ (ch. 6). ‘He’s a nasty, stuck-up, greasy Jew’ (ch. 7). Speaking of her horror at having been courted by a Jew, the heroine explains to her listener: ‘Ifyou know the sort of feeling I have for him—such as you would have ifyou found a cockroach in your dressing-case’ (ch. 8). The Landleaguers was published, unfin­ ished, in 1883, the year after Trollope’s death.

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so as his wife is identified firmly as a Bohemian Jewess—who bestrides the book. Melmotte gathers simple-minded but venal noblemen into his pocket, uses them for his criminal schemes, and ruins them. In so doing—and this is the gravamen of Trollope’s charge—the depth to which the ancient ruling class of England and indeed England as a whole have fallen stands revealed. The old marquis tries to talk his son into marrying the Jew’s daughter despite strong suspicions about Melmotte’s honesty and even his resources. ‘I don’t believe in the money,’ the son finally objects. The marquis tries another tack. ‘They tell me,’ said the old man, ‘that one of those Goldsheiner girls will have a lot of money.’ ‘AJewess,’ suggested [Lord] Nidderdale. ‘What difference does that make?’ ‘Oh no;—not in the least;—if the money’s really there.’

The story is studded with lesser indicators of Trollope’s views. Regarding the admission of Jews to Parliament, one respectable character was ‘certain’ that ‘when that had been done... the glory of England was sunk for ever’. ‘It’s only since those nasty Radicals came up that they have been able to sit in Parliament,’ a proper mother tells her rebellious daughter. ‘One of the greatest judges in the land is a Jew,’ the daughter retorts. The mother is not to be moved: ‘Nothing that the Radicals can do can make them [i.e. the Jews] anything else but what they are.’45 What is absent in Trollope, however, or in Dickens for that matter, or any other writer of the day who touched on the subject in this spirit is anything approaching close, to say nothing ofsystematic, study of the Jews themselves. Trollope’s complacent ignorance of Jewry and Judaism, epitomized in the absurdly impossible name (Mahomet Moss) he gave the Jewish music master in The Landleaguers, is at least as telling as his dislike of them. But while his dislike of the Jews is unmistakable and his bitterness about what he perceives to be the social and moral decline of his country is affirmed with something like passion, there is no serious suggestion of what might be done to deal with either the one or the other. On the continent, as so often, the inter­ play between ‘opinion’ and political action was generally a great deal closer and the tendency to knead the former into a system of ideas of one kind or another in the interests of the latter always very much stronger.

IV

One of the ironies of the position of the modernists in Jewry and one of the reasons why the form and stridency of the campaign that was 45 The Way We Live N